
The font colour should normally be set to Automatic, and in our case it was inexplicably set to white.

You find this option by going to File > Options > Mail > Stationery and Fonts, then clicking the Font button under Composing and reading plain text messages. Sure enough, somehow the font option for reading and composing plain text emails had been set to a white font. I quickly determined that it was only plain text emails that were affected (rather than those with HTML or Rich Text formatting), which led me to investigate the font options.


He knew there was text there, because he could highlight the invisible text and copy & paste it into Word. Shortly after upgrading to Outlook 2013 from Outlook 2010, one of my users complained that some of his emails were showing up with invisible text in the message body.
