At 13:04 -0400 18/08/2011, Bill Steele wrote:


>Getting the text of an incoming message in Apple Mail is pretty 
>straightforward (albeit not intuitive):
>
>tell application "Mail"
>set mySel to selection
>set Msg to item 1 of mySel
>set msgText to content of Msg
>end tell
>
>(Why those lines won't combined escapes me)

Probably because you tried ...item 1 of selection..., which would 
have worked in the old days but not under the new order.


tell application "Mail"
	set _msg_body_as_text to content of item 1 of (get selection)
end tell


>Works fine most of the time, but every so often I hit a message 
>where the result is
>
>"?"

What do you get if you ask for 'source' rather than 'content', which 
gives you a plain text conversion of the message body?

JD