IMAP messages from random dates?

I have exactly the same problem with IMAP email on the iPhone. Apple Mail on my Mac sorts the emails correctly (i.e. by date received), but iPhone Mail displays them in a (seemingly) random order.

I recently migrated the mail account in question from POP to IMAP, so spent a while transferring emails into a new IMAP account in Apple Mail on my Mac; I didn't transfer these in chronological order.

Is iPhone mail incorrectly pulling email off the server based on the time the mail was last modified (i.e. added to the server) rather than by the date of the email?

Regards,

Ian

I believe you are right about the chronological order thing. I think MobileMe, rather than the iPhone, sorts email by the time it was last modified. I recently had to restore my mailbox on my iMac from a backup. When it next synced with MobileMe, it seemed to sync the emails in an almost random order, and that's the order that now exists on my iPhone.
I think the only way to fix it would be to delete my inbox, then restore the emails one by one in chronological order. I might play around with Automator to see if I could do that.
Andy.

The iPhone fetches the messages in the order they were modified, not in the order they were sent or received. Here is what I did not work around this problem:
1. Go to MobileMe webmail
2. Sort the problematic mailbox by date, newest on top. For me it was my Sent messages.
3. Set the prefs to display the largest number of messages that's possible (200)
4. Create a new mailbox called Temp for example
5. Choose Select All. Choose Move to Folder... and choose to move the selected messages to the Temp folder
6. Go to the Temp folder, sort the messages by date.
7. Select All, move back to the original folder.

The messages have now been modified in the order then were sorted. For me, my iPhone now displays at least the 200 latest emails in the correct order and that is good enough for me.

Great suggestion. I've run into this problem numerous times, and again tonight. Tried your method and it worked great! Now all we need is apple to change the iphone to fetch in order of receive date...Thanks!

I've rather given up on this. I figure I'll get enough new email in the coming days / week to effectively push out the old mail. Good luck with sorting out something in Automator!

Regards,

Ian