Mail app leaving blank spaces

Hi gjposton,

Welcome to Apple Support Communities. From my understanding, it sounds like you see blank space in the Mail app after email messages are deleted. I’d love to assist you.

For this issue, I recommend connecting to another reliable network to see if the issue persists. I see that your iPhone is connected via Personal Hotspot. Try turning Personal Hotspot off in the Settings app, then connecting to a reliable Wi-Fi network. It's possible that your device's connection is preventing Mail from updating as quickly as expected.

If the issue persists, I recommend taking steps 1-3 here: If an app unexpectedly quits, stops responding, or won’t open. Force quitting the Mail app, restarting your iPhone, and checking for updates can help resolve the issue. 

Lastly, consider how your email is synced to your iPhone. Is it via a web email account, or are they synced with another device (i.e. iPad or Mac)?  If so, check to see if the issue continues when deleting emails from your other device or from web mail. 

I hope this information was useful. Kind regards.

Marco-777

User level:

Level 1

In response to gjposton

On my iPhone I went into the Settings app, and clicked on “password and settings” . From there I selected my email account and did 2 things. I renamed the account. And i turned OFF mail. I killed the email app and the turned back ON the mail account. All blanks went away. Not sure if both steps are needed, but that is what I did.

I didn’t have to fully delete the account. Seems to be better, even after a few days.

This seems to have flagged as a macOS issue. It's not. It's a 'Using iPhone' issue.

This problem started relatively recently, last year.

My wife and I both have iPhone 6s's at the latest update 13.3.

We both have sky.com email that connects to Yahoo!.

My wife has the problem where she gets blank spaces in her inbox and new emails are not appearing in the inbox.

If she searches for the email by keyword it appears as being in the inbox.

If she cancels the search goes back to the inbox it is not there.

If she selects a blank space she get "No Mail"

If she logs into the Yahoo server via a browser, the new mail is there.

I am NOT having these problems on my iPhone so it is not dodgy wifi.

So far I have:-

1. Deleted and set up her mail account on the iphone using the settings recommended from Sky's website. This means that when setting up the account I choose Other as opposed to Yahoo!
2. Uninstalled the mail app and reinstalled it from the app store, although it actually downloads it from the iCloud.
3. Reset her phone to factory and restored from a recent back up
4. Played around with the Thread settings on the iPhone.

I don't want to set up the Sky account by selecting Yahoo! as I feel she will be bombarded with Yahoo popups

I am loath to reset her iPhone to factory set it up as new phone and not add any apps.

I don't see why she should go through the inconvenience.

Each time I carried out one of these actions, all the expected emails appeared and the spaces disappeared only for the problem to return after a few days.

Come on Apple!

Sort it out.

There are enough people having this issue to be able to debug it.

I am willing to take my wife's iPhone into a Local genius store for them to reproduce the problem and capture logs from her iPhone and I won't charge them!

This problem is not exclusive to Older models.

Apple, are you listening?

Perhaps if I put some rude words in this post it may be automatically flagged and they'll notice.

I have the same issue. So frustrating. I have deleted my mail account 20 times and reloaded it. The blank email issue always returns. Sometimes before this happens I stop getting updates on my emails.

I ahve at least 6 calls into Apple support and there is still no resolution.

I have inclosed a pic a pic.

I have jacked with a million settings on my phone for two months. Finally figured it out today. In the mail settings, all of the options were turned on for threading. After I turned them off, the blank email spaces went away.

I think it's a bug in the Mail app. I've tried deleting my email account (AT&T) and then putting it back. It's ok for one session, but the next time it fetches my mail and me deleting the messages, the blank space comes back. It doesn't happen with my gmail and outlook apps. I'm on a wi-fi connection at home, by the way.

I contacted Apple Support and I sent them some screenshots. They’re going to send it to engineering and they’ll study it. They’ll get back to me by Wednesday and, if necessary, get some log files from me.

I updated both of our iPads to iPadOS 13.1.3. I have a 6th gen iPad and my wife has an iPad Air 2. Only my wife's Air 2 has this problem. She has a growing string of empty email slots that can't be deleted. It only happens in her Yahoo account. And we are on a strong wi-fi connection.

I’m having the same issue I’ve been on the phone with Apple at least five times they say they’ve never heard of this happening. I finally thought it was fixed during the last update because the space problem did not happen for four days and then this morning it happened again and even though I have deleted and reinstalled my emails the problem arises every time it seems ridiculous that Apple cannot solve this problem. I’ve also never had This issue and any other iPhone until I got the 11 pro max

I have the same problem on IOS 13.1.2 iPad Pro 3rd generation. Only happened since last IOS update. I have restarted iPad, reinstalled mail app to no avail. Does not do it on iMac OSX. Does not do it on 2012 iPad 4 because it won’t update past 10.2 and Lo! Everything works.

C’mon Apple 1 month is too long to issue a fix for an obvious bug.

This is input from a very unskilled iPhone 8 user. I was having this problem and was following the steps mentioned here. When I went to my Passwords and Account Settings, my Outlook Acct was active and my Hotmail account was inactive. I switched the two, and my blank email messages are gone. This may not be of use to anyone, but I thought I’d share just in case.

I actually thought I had a six for this issue. I actually did not know you could delete the mail app on the iPhone which I did and then reinstalled it I knew I could delete the email account and re-install that which I have done over 20 times without it fixing the problem. When I deleted the Mail app and reinstalled it it did work for approximately a week but then the blank spaces came back. Something else everyone should know if you use another email app which I have now done called Spark it works very well.

It is 100% the mail app. I deleted it and I downloaded A mail app by the name of spark I’ve had it for two weeks absolutely no problem at all. So I didn’t have any issues with my contacts or other items that iOS tends to incorporate with each other I RE downloaded the Apple app for mail and just shoved it into my utilities folder. I would go back to the iOS mail app if they would figure out how to fix this problem but in the meantime this is been a good fix for me. Steve

Something interesting happened. I went into Mail to see how hard it was to delete my account and found my default email had changed somehow to iCloud. I changed it back to my name account and the errors have disappeared.