Q: After ios9 update my emails with attachments won't open and say "message not yet downloaded from server". They were there previously. How do I get them back?

Couldn't help but notice that prior to this comment, there were exactly 666 replies to this thread!

Rather ironically, the email on my iPad  from Apple reminding me yesterday of my support call appointment this morning has been replaced by, yes you've guessed it, "This message has not been downloaded from the server."...

Background activity for Mail app has always been noticable since IOS9 update, often the Mail app will get stuck or freeze, necessitating to close the App.

Additionally, IOS9 also displays a whole list of other little irksome things not noticed in previous IOS versions. Hopefully the next iteration of IOS9 will show a marked improvement.

Indeed - I've had mail crash when I delete multiple emails, so this thread's issue isn't the only one I get.

I just wonder what it's meant to be doing in the background when it's not set up for scheduled fetches - imo, it should be almost entirely dormant till  I invoke it. You don't expect a process akin to file transfer to be doing anything after it's downloaded its payload and been closed.

Can't argue with anything you said.

I'd just add that it's a common feature of IOS / OSX these days to be doing stuff that I don't expect (or need) it to!

My love affair with Apple is fast diminishing and I know for sure I'm not alone. I'm under no illusions though, there are plenty of 12year olds and people with less exacting requirements to take my place.

As far as this particular thread goes, I think its dying because those people affected have either already found their workaround solution, ditched Mail, or are waiting patiently for Apple to issue next iteration of IOS9. Does iPad Pro ship with IOS9.1? If so, then maybe we'll see more activity on the thread.

I've been following your discussion with Brantome and I must say I haven't noticed background activity on my iPad, but I must agree with you about the way Apple seems to be going.  I moved over to Apple about 4 years ago after becoming progressively fed up with Windows - endless updates and endless maintenance to make the updates work.  My experience with Apple started ok - my first impressions was that the hardware was nicely designed (eye candy) but the applications were not really up to what I needed -so I bough Microsoft Works 2011 and Lightroom.  The OS at that time was Mountain Lion.

Apple has since then gone through Mavericks, Yosemite and now El Capitain.  With each upgrade new features were introduced which, in my opinion, were a waste of time and not wanted.  They have however introduced issues which are serious.  If I were looking at Apple now I would not buy it.  There is too much emphasis on Cloud storage - something I have always said is dangerous.  I have a large collection of photos - some historical - which would have been lost if I had used this form of storage with one or two of the early providers (not Apple).  This development is clearly driven by profit - iPhones cannot store your life and therefore iCloud is necessary - but only if you live on your iPhone.

As to my iPad - I have tried to work out what is going on, but it seems to be completely random now.  I have both IMAP and POP accounts; some of them lose the data after a couple of days, some don't.  I have deliberately left emails on the iPad both read and unread and there is no pattern.  There is one email that I read 6 months ago, but have left in the inbox which can still be read  - and it's a POP account.

I give up - I just hope 9.2 sorts this out because my iPad is useless for receiving emails.  I have sent several freeback reports to Apple.

Hardware is lovely...

- except now phones are too big to use as a phone, so 5s will be my last unless the trend changes.

- Mac's still are lovely, except I can't stand glossy screens, so 17" 2.93ghz will be my last.

- IOS and OSX are just too demanding now. There was a time when you just pressed download and it worked. Not anymore, as a minimum you now you have to comb through settings and turn off everything that's defaulted to on.

As to this particular issue... If you haven't noticed background activity related to mail on your device, then maybe your router will give you indication of the activity going on. Anyway, on my device it's clearly apparent with frequent lock-ups. (I also saw a couple of other threads re' mail issues that seem to suffer from serious background activity issues).

I've given up on trying to figure out what is going on - like you I have a mix of IMAP & POP accounts. For me, IMAP seems unaffected. However POP was screwed up as soon as I installed IOS9. I've spent days trying to figure it out, no joy. Same conclusion as you, it's completely random.

It seems lots of folk are hoping that 9.2 will sort things out for them - I guess Apple are also hoping for the same.

seems it still shows 666 replies.

Re background activity, go to Settings/Battery and tap on Mail. Mine shows 2hrs on screen and 2.2 hrs background over the last seven days, so the Ipad is using Mail more than me

For people suffering this with Google mail services using POP account I found the cure. (iPhone 5S ios 9.1.)

Log into Gmail account, go to setting for POP and IMAP.

*** Disable IMAP. ***

You may also like to change setting for leave copy of mail on the server, although I don't think that was the issue.

IMPORTANT: If you access your mail using the Gmail login interface on any app this resets IMAP to on. You need to log back in and disable it again to fix.

Once disabled IMAP the lost mail reappeared again.

Why on earth haven't Apple fixed this yet. It's driving me nuts. Same issue as everyone else. POP emails already downloaded to my iPhone become unviewable once I've deleted them off the server on another device. ***......FIX IT NOW PLEASE

I am running Apple Mail and myMail apps in parallel on both an iPad2 & iPhone6.  The battery usage of myMail is about 1/2 of the Apple Mail usage on bot devices.

I have found myMail a little slow to load, but it has been flawless and it you can set up mail folders.

5 mins on screen - 20 minutes background.

So, we think iOS 9.2 (which should really be called iOS 9.0.4) may fix the POP issue, but couldn't we just push for the old mail app back? Have we determined it's the iOS rather than just the app itself? Would the iOS 8 Mail app work on iOS 9.1? I still have the *.ipa file in my Deleted Items box on my PC, after all.

Why haven't they fixed it? .... Multiple choice:

- either they don't care about their customers

- too busy fixing other issues that effect more users

- they can't fix it (after all - according to some posters in this thread it's not broken)

- they aren't going to fix it

- delayed until 24th December - when it will offered as a "free seasonal gift"

Whichever conspiracy theory you prefer.