Email body is showing empty for some emails in email service handler

Question

I have developed an email service handler in which I am noticing some some of them showing null in the plainTextBody field although there is a body present. Below is my sample code

global Messaging.InboundEmailResult handleInboundEmail(Messaging.InboundEmail email, Messaging.InboundEnvelope envelope) {
    Messaging.InboundEmailResult result = new Messaging.InboundEmailresult();

    try{            
       System.debug('from email address = '+email.fromAddress);
        System.debug('email subject = '+email.subject);
        System.debug('plainTextBody = '+email.plainTextBody); //this is showing blank in logs

The forwarding inbox has a copy of the email forwarded to the email handler address and I see the body is present in the email. Initially I thought it was due to HTML content in the email but I tried a couple of emails with HTML content and they seem to show the body fine(with html markup as text).

Could it be because the email was encrypted by the sender?

Answer 1

This code works if plainTextBody is blank, but htmlBody is not. There is a regex express to strip all html tags from the html body. The result may not be pretty, but the text should survive.

        String plainText = '';
    if (string.isNotBlank(email.plainTextBody)) {
        try {
              plainText = email.plainTextBody.substring(0, email.plainTextBody.indexOf('<stop>'));
        }
        catch (System.StringException e) {
             plainText = email.plainTextBody;
        }          
    } 
    else if (string.isNotBlank(email.htmlBody)) {
            // Process html body only if plain text body is blank      
        try {
            plainText = email.htmlBody.substring(0, email.htmlBody.indexOf('<stop>'));
        }
        catch (System.StringException e) {
             plainText = email.htmlBody;
        }
            // Strip all html tags from html body
        Pattern htmlPattern = Pattern.compile('</?[a-z][a-z0-9]*[^<>]*>'); 
        plainText = htmlPattern.matcher(plainText).replaceAll('');                     
    }