Q: Not able to open attachments in email after dowloading ios 9

Its not quite as simple as going back to IOS 8 - there are some aspects you lose by doing so and most of us don't have the technical know-how to do it anyway.

Its a shame the Apple guy didn't follow through on his promise to follow up with e-mail contact with Sonny Disco - if he's bamboozled by it, then he should at least pass the problem on to the higher echelons of tech-power within Apple.

The fact that the memory usage is now radically reduced indicates a deliberate action on behalf of the software writers - I sincerely hope they get told to put it right PDQ.  The longer this issue goes on, the more critical it becomes - especially for those who rely on only one device.  At least the problem hasn't raised its head (YET) on laptops (Macs).  God help us all if they take the same route with the next version of the operating system for Macs!!!! (El Capitan I think).

HI there, I also have this issue.  I have my iPad Air 2 Mail set up as POP.  I have lost content on important historical emails downloaded months ago, and long since deleted from the sever, so gone forever .  It is still happening, lost content on some from yesterday, although these have not yet been downloaded from the server.  But shows Mail is trawling through emails, and fiddling daily.

I am being told on other forums to use IMAP,  but I prefer POP, and it has worked for many years on my IPad.  I have IMAP (set to 1 days mail) on my phone to see the days emails, every week or so, I download mail to my laptop on POP, and messages are then deleted from the server.  My iPad had POP, so messages also download there, so I can read, review, save and respond to at my leisure, in portable manner rather than firing up the laptop.

Note to those considering rolling back to IOS 8, I went to the effort to do this as I had backed up before the IOS 9 upgrade.  Sadly I had since backed up to IOS 9 so pre upgrade backup had been appended to, and IOS 8 was unable to read the backup.  I understand Mac users can "archive" their backup to create separate ones, so if done on an IOS 8 backup it can be restored.  Unfortunately this option not available to  PC users.

Have minutes ago upgraded to IOS 9.1 but Mail issue not mentioned on the update notes so not hopeful.  Come on Apple, please get this sorted for us.  You can't give me my precious emails and attachmente IOS 9 deleted but, please let's get IOS 9 POP Mail working again. 

I am both upset and perplexed by this, if they did indeed make the local storage on iPhone's and iPad's have lower capacity that is simply a bad idea. That being said, even with a capacity drop, I would still have this issue. I have maybe 356kb of data in my inbox on my iPhone and I still get the "This message has not been downloaded from the server" error. In my case bandwidth is not the issue, it is the fact that e-mails downloaded to my iPhone will not stay on my iPhone for longer than two hours regardless if i erase it from the server or not. I e-mailed the tech at Apple again this morning and he has yet to reply. I don't think they know what the problem is and even worse, are not doing a thing about it.

Apple doesn't moderate these forums. It is simply a place for us to look for answers and cry.

IT gets worse - I've just downloaded the update 9.1 and now I can't even open new emails.  The same message appears about not downloaded from the server. 

I'M very cross and angry at Apple, I have an iPad, iPhone, iMac and MacBook Pro and my wife has an iPhone an iPad Mini and an older MacBook Pro - a loyal customer to Apple and this is what they do!

LIke VW, they will soon lose customers if they don't get this sorted.  I had several purchase receipts from firms (like Apple) who no longer issue paper receipts and so now proof of purchase for warranty reasons are gone!  GREAT.

I ran the update last night. Woke up and all of my e-mails were on my phone still. I was excited. The e-mails remained there all day, then at 4:00pm PST, the dreaded "This message has not been downloaded from the server" replaced my e-mail bodies. This is a complete joke.

I have had the same thing happen I will feel like the emails are saving and then I go to look at it four or five hours later and they are no longer readable.....

Plus some emails that I had saved in a different folder will now just say loading and loading and loading and nothing ever happens.... This is extremely disappointing when 90% of business online is done via email

Agreed. What's the point of technology if it fails to store our important information? Might as well go back to keeping paper backups of everything.

I declined to pay $39 to chat with support about this one issue.

Another annoying email bug I'm finding after installing iOS9 is that every time I open mail it's on the same message from 17 September 2015. I then need to scroll madly to view the latest emails. Infuriating.

Please fix the email app, Apple.

It looks like the update cleaned up the attachments. Most email servers now uses IMAP, it synchronizes the email status. The only mail server I have is with my only POP email. On the other IMAP email servers, it redownloads the emails with attachments. My POP fails if the email was deleted off the server by another computer.

the only way to recover the "deleted" attachments is to restore your iOS devicue backup on a iOS 8 device and save the attachments. I wonder if it could be recovered by restoring from pre iOS 9 backup?

going forward until (the next release?) it does not lose the attachment  Ive  that.

2 Years ago me and a friend lost all our read email from gmail server when we updated to iOS 7.

Apple did not test the software well with POP email, or the beta users didn't notice it.

Someone at Apple MUST realize that this is a MAJOR bug and do something about it.  You have made them aware of the problem, which we are all in together, and many thanks for that. WHY is it so hard to contact Apple about something so important?

I Didn't find it hard to contact apple support at all. I have now talked to two senior advisors, emailed screenshots of the problem and have now been told it has been passed to operating system software department for action. Now have to wait two working days for an answer, but have been reassured I will be contacted  next week, hopefully not by email as I wouldn't receive the content!

All,

I have the same issue.  I have identified at least 4 other separate threads on the apple forums as well as numerous threads on other forums.  I will attempt to précis them here and also provide links so you can read through my sources yourselves.  Note there is, as always, a significant amount of duff information, guessing and questionable fact obscuring the useful evidence.

1. this issue only appears to be affecting people with email accounts set up for pop/smtp.

2. Following upgrade to iOS 9 / iOS 9.01 and possibly the 9.1 beta as well, email content is removed from the iOS device resulting in a sudden decrease in the storage required for the mail app.

3. Emails that may have been present on the device for many months and accessed multiple times in both the inbox and sent items will be randomly replaced with the basic placeholder information (similar to a IMAP case prior to download) but with the body and attachments replaced by the statement: This message has not been downloaded from the server.

4. Deleting the account and setting it up again from scratch does not solve the issue and will result in the loss of all the email placeholders - further increasing your loss of knowledge.

5. Switching the account to IMAP if you go for a delete and re-setup will also result in the loss of all the email placeholders but will 'probably' solve the problem (within the limitations of IMAP) for future emails.  

6. this affects all iOS devices - iPads (all gens on iOS 9) iPhones (all gens on iOS 9)

7. This affects you irrespective of you country, internet provider or email provider - the discriminator is the use of pop/smtp.

8. pop/smtp is not legacy or backward compared to imap it is just different.  We use pop/smtp for 3 reasons: we don't want emails left on the server where a questionably secure environment could be compromised; our family want the ability to all download the same email to multiple devices without affecting each others ability to do so; we want one master device (the main iMac) to be the deleting device that holds the archive of all emails (right now we are very pleased we have this as all the iOS devices are scorched earth right now).

9. Some emails appear unaffected - I cannot identify any rhyme or reason to this.  Old, new, addressee, - there doesn't seem to be a pattern. Can't say for certain but it seems that more are being affected as time goes on.  If you are affected and you have the only copy of an email currently and you are going to need it again.....get it somewhere else ASAP!!!

10. This thread and forum is just for sharing knowledge between users.  If this has affected you then you need to fill in the apple feedback page with your confirmed symptoms and the impact if you want anything to be done.  Follow this link and do it now or apple pop users will remain without a fix!  I recommend do one for each type of iOS device you have affected and the mail app itself. 

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Here are the other apple forum threads related to this issue - maybe someone else is familiar with a clever way to link them all up - please do so if you know how:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7226924

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7221489

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7226501

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7227219

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7230143