These messages appear blank on my iPhone. No image and no text.
I found that if I hit forward or reply the image appears in the new copy of the message that is the reply or forward copy. So, the image and text is there, but just not displayed in the incoming message.
Has anyone seen a fix for this?
Can these alerts be sent in plain text instead?
Sounds to me like an issue with the phone, not with Vera. Maybe a mail setting? Do you use gmail? Maybe you could use the gmail client instead?
These Vera alert messages are the only messages that appear blank. If all my messages were blank or even one other message from another source was blank, then it would look like a problem with the phone or email client.
I’m trying to figure out what about the format of only these messages triggers the iOS mail client to have this issue.
I have read that the default client in iOS will hide the content of email sent with only a remotely-hosted image in the body without any accompanying text (even when the client is set to otherwise display remote images) since messages like that are usually spam, but these alert messages appear to also contain text. Maybe there is something about the format of the text in these alert messages that is incompatible with the iPhone mail client, so it looks like a message with nothing but an embedded remote image.
I tried enabling the setting to download remote images in email and it didn’t help this issue. Even when remote images are not downloaded, I can still see any included text in body of the email in every other message. The body of these Vera alert messages appear 100% blank in iOS 7.1 Mail. Not even the text part of the messages appears in the body.
It is an iPhone 5 with Gmail and no other email messages in the account using the same mail client have this issue.
I would download the actual gmail client and try that to see if the messages show up. If they do, you know it’s something specific to the iOS email client and possibly something vera is doing, if they don’t, then it points to an iOS wide issue or a problem with the vera.
I have multiple email accounts and they are not all Gmail accounts (some are work-related Exchange accounts), so that would require me to use multiple email apps for mail and that would be a hassle to not have one place to see all messages.
I don’t doubt that it is specific to iOS since I opened the same messages on an Android device and they are not blank there.
However, the fact remains that the issue is unique to these Vera alert messages and is probably some encoding issue that is incompatible with the iOS mail app. I receive a very large amount of email from many different senders and none other the other messages from any other sender have this issue.
If Vera can change this on their end (there is clearly something different about the formatting or encoding of only these alert messages), it would work for all mail clients.
The iOS mail app for iPhones is a very widely-used mainstream mail app that is going to be the default app for most people using these devices and people are not going to want to change their mail app to work around an issue that only affects the uniquely-formatted Vera alert messages.
I didn’t suggest that the change be permanent, only to be used as a diagnostic tool. Just because it only happens to you (that you know of) with messages from the vera doesn’t mean that’s it’s a vera issue either. I’m trying to help you eliminate the possible causes to figure out the culprit but…
Since you don’t want my help, I’ll take the hint…
I don’t have a solution, but I am seeing the same thing as webuser. I also agree that Vera needs to fix this. More people use the iOS mail client than Vera by orders of magnitude and I see more problems with Vera than iOS.
I went back to text message alerts after getting these to work again.
I’m not an iOS user but my text message alerts now say “no content”. My emails are fine. I believe it’s related to the Vera upgrades in preparation to UI7.
Here is my thread in the General forum: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,25963.0.html
I’m seeing the same thing. Any fix?
Same issue here with UI7
Is this issue only with iPhone? I don’t seem to have the trouble on my iPad.
Same thing happens to me, they are HTML now, they added a bunch of images and formatting that do not download/display properly on iOS. The text messages also come like that and they get split in a couple of messages. Talked to Vera support about it, sent them samples. Got this:
"Hello Benjamin,
I was able to reproduce your issue with the notifications, rest assured the issue that you reported has already been forwarded to our development team and is currently under their review.
I will get back to you as soon as I have an answer.
Thank you.
Regards,
Vera Smarter Home Control
Technical Support Team"
Have not heard back from them…
I turned them off, use VeraAlerts instead. Hopefully they will fix. HTML and images on these are not good, pretty, but not good as most email readers block remote images by default, treat emails like that as spam.
Bengie
So it has been two years since the issue was reported, and I as a new buyer of VeraPlus run straight into it. Wow!
I got this issue on my iPhone and on Outlook.
While it does work eventually, it takes a long time for the message to be loaded.
It seems to load resources from the web.
Vera Team: Please add an option to send just plain text messages.
This is easy to do and keeps things simple.