iCloud sent emails vanishing

There is a new feature in iOS 16 that lets you “unsend” a message you have sent. It delays sending the message for 10 seconds, or a different time that you can set instead of 10 seconds. You can also turn it off by choosing None. Go to Settings/Mail/Undo Send Delay (all the way at the bottom of the mail settings page) to change the delay.

The mail will still be sent if you go back to the Home screen from the mail app, and it will also be sent if you lock the phone.

HOWEVER, If you are in the (bad) habit of force-closing the mail app by swiping up its image from the Quick Launch (multitasking) screen the message will not be sent, because force-closing any app stops it instantly, without giving the app a chance to complete what it was doing.

The HUGE bug is force closing apps, against all advice from Apple and many other outside experts.

It won’t go out after 10 seconds because the mail app has to be running to send it, and force closing an app stops it instantly, so there is no app running to send it. The message is also held in RAM until it is actually sent (at which point it goes to the Outbox, then to the Sent folder), and an app's RAM is volatile and is also cleared when you force-close an app. This isn’t only a problem for the mail app. When you exit an app “gracefully” to the Home screen iOS gives it a chance to save its volatile data to storage. If you kill it, however, any data that had not yet been saved is lost. This is especially noticeable with the Messages app, but many other apps are affected. Most apps, when you open them, will display whatever was on the screen when you last exited the app to the Home screen. However, a force-closed app will always go back to its initial start-up state when you next launch it.

yunquekabal wrote:

That doesn’t address the issue. Does the mail app not periodically save emails to the draft folder as they are composed?

Yes, it saves drafts. But as soon as you tap Send it is no longer a draft, and it is held in RAM until it is send, then moved to Sent.

If I started to compose an email on my phone, and wanted to continue on my laptop, wouldn’t I be able to find it in my drafts folder?

Yes, but again, once you tap Send it is no longer a draft.

This is a redundant question as I have done this before and I know for a fact that the app saves drafts.

Even say I force quit the app, why would that allow for the email to be completely destroyed and unretrievable? The email should either be in the outbox or in the drafts folder.

Because a mail about to be sent is still in RAM until it is acted on. But if you force-close the app while it is in RAM it hasn’t been placed in the Outbox yet.

The Mail app is only an email client. It works in conjunction with IMAP and other email technologies. Perhaps this is where the problem lies: Does iCloud email not sync across devices and services in the way that Outlook and Office365 does? Is it an IMAP service, or perhaps less than so? Does it use POP technology? That would be pretty shocking for a company like Apple and a service as advanced as iCloud.

email never syncs between devices. email syncs to the email server. The same is true for Outlook and Office 365, the syncing is done at the server. Whether it uses IMAP, POP or Exchange it is the Mail app that contains the code for IMAP, POP and Exchange.

And while we are at it, Contacts, Calendar events, Notes and Reminders also sync device to server, not device to device.

And for entertaining the force quit argument: why does iOS allow force quit of its core applications without warning or offering to save unsaved data if it is so? Why is force quitting an application so easy?

Force quitting exists for exactly ONE purpose; to close an app that is frozen or not working properly. And it isn’t easy; you have to first go to the multitasking screen, which requires swiping up and PAUSING at the middle of the screen, then swiping up on the app to force close it.

And for the record, the removal of the home button in iPhone X has sorta put the force quitting feature in the spotlight by forcing users to go through the feature to access the home screen. The only other way that I’ve heard of to access the home screen is by setting up the backtap to do so, and that was only after 2 years of owning my iPhone 12 mini.

NONSENSE! It does NOT force users to go through that procedure to access the Home screen. To go from any app to the Home screen put your finger on the bottom of the screen and swipe up quickly, and only a short distance. I go from apps to the Home screen hundreds of times a day, and I never end up in the multitasking screen. And even if you do accidentally, just tap on the bottom of the screen to close it.

In the time since I opened this discussion, I have come across another email that I 100% sent out, and that is once again nowhere to be found. Once again using my iCloud email address in iOS Mail.

Should I reach out to Apple Support? Is there a log they can retrieve? Where have these

emails gone? This is destroying my workflow, and has only started happening recently, and I’ve been force quitting apps for years.

Well, the send delay feature is new, and that is what causes the problem when you force-quit. Actually, if you force-quit really fast after tapping send it would also lose the message, but the timing for that would be probably less than a second. With the send delay, by default it is 10 seconds, and you can make it longer, or turn it off entirely. If you plan to keep force-quitting I would turn off send delay; it’s in Settings/Mail, at the bottom.

update: I check my iCloud settings and can confirm iCloud is set to sync with iCloud Mail

OK, but iCloud mail sync actually syncs mail settings, not the actual email contents.

The only possible answer is that the you force closed the mail app, and that removed it from RAM before it was sent. There is no other reasonable explanation.