HTML in Mail

[rockstarjoe]

Hello. I had an old .PST file of all of my Outlook email that I wanted to import into Mail. I couldn't find a way to do this directly, so I followed some online instructions that showed me how to import the PST into Eudora and then export it into a format that Mail would accept. So now all of my old email is in Mail, which is awesome. But the strange thing is, many of the old emails now appear to have HTML tags all over them. I guess this was a biproduct of the import / export / import process.

Has anyone encountered this issue before? Any way to strip out all of the HTML tags? They make it almost impossible to read my old emails. Thanks for any help!

 

[mkrishnan]

It could be that somehow they were output by Outlook with malformed headers or something like that... this often happens when the header is bad and the interpreting program detects this and just ignores the rest of the code.

The other possibility is that you have viewing HTML turned off in Mail? Try to see if you get viewing alternatives in the View menu?

 

[rockstarjoe]

Well, it isn't the header, because I can still show / hide the header info. It appears to be HTML formatting of the content of the emails themselves (whether or not they were originally HTML encoded, I think). Under view the option to view as plain text is greyed out. Weird, eh?

 

[mkrishnan]

Well, it isn't the header, because I can still show / hide the header info. It appears to be HTML formatting of the content of the emails themselves (whether or not they were originally HTML encoded, I think). Under view the option to view as plain text is greyed out. Weird, eh?

That's not quite what I mean. When an e-mail or any other document is formatted as HTML, there is an HTML header that explains the document type and cues the parser to know that it is seeing HTML. Sometimes if this header is malformed, programs refuse to interpret the HTML, maybe because of fears of malicious code?

I think the plain text is greyed out b/c it's already displaying as plain text. There should be two options in there for the previous/next alternative...do they do anything?

 

[rockstarjoe]

That's not quite what I mean. When an e-mail or any other document is formatted as HTML, there is an HTML header that explains the document type and cues the parser to know that it is seeing HTML. Sometimes if this header is malformed, programs refuse to interpret the HTML, maybe because of fears of malicious code?

I think the plain text is greyed out b/c it's already displaying as plain text. There should be two options in there for the previous/next alternative...do they do anything?

Ah, I understand what you are saying now about the headers. That could be the problem.

When I go to the view menu the previous/next alternative option is also greyed out.