I don't have any wisdom about this. I'm replying mostly to say that I've 
had this problem as well.


Thunderbird is my email reader and has been for five or six years at 
least. I go through lots of messages everyday, for personal 
communication, discussion lists, and work. Ninety-nine percent of the 
time everything works fine, but every so often, I receive messages that 
appear to be blank. They're not. I can usually read the text if I reply 
or forward the message to myself, and I also notice that, on discussion 
lists, I sometimes read a message, then someone else's complaint that 
the poster sent a blank email to the list.


I haven't found any reliable solution. Sometimes I can read the message 
body if I switch over to NVDA, but other times, NVDA gives me the same 
results as Jaws. Even the things I mentioned earlier (i.e., replying or 
forwarding the message) produces inconsistent results.


And yes, when it happens, it seems to happen in spurts. In other words, 
I receive a handful of messages like this over a period of a few days. 
Then the problem corrects itself without updates to Thunderbird or the 
screen reader.



On 1/31/2017 6:21 AM, Duane Farrar wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am using Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client, version 45.7.0, 
> which is the latest update. I use JAWS 17.0.2727 as my screen reader.
>
> For the past few days I have experienced the following with some, but 
> not all, messages. When I open a new message JAWS will read the 
> subject line but not the body of the message. Trying to simply arrow 
> down from the subject line does nothing; it behaves as if the body of 
> the message is not there is a scanned graphic, as happens with some 
> PDF documents. However, if I reply to the message then I can read the 
> entire text of the message. I've tried experimenting with as many 
> "View" menu or "Tools/Options" settings as I can find but nothing 
> seems to change this behavior. Suggestions, anyone?
>
> Some further background: Over the weekend a sighted friend assisted me 
> with changing the font and paragraph settings for formatting new 
> messages using the "Tools/Options/General" settings. Could we have 
> changed a setting that would be causing the behavior I have described 
> above?
>
> Also, apparently there are formatting list boxes for font settings, 
> etc., between the subject line and body text that I cannot access by 
> tabbing back and forth between the two areas. I have no usable vision 
> and have no idea how I can access these when writing a new message. 
> Can anyone offer any advice? Why doesn't Thunderbird have font and 
> paragraph dialogs akin to Microsoft Word that are easy to access?
>
> Thanks,
> Duane
>
>
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