iPad Mail Troubles - Saved Drafts Disappear, Sent Mail Doesn't Show

I see the choice of mailboxes when using IMAP like Gmail as described by Aurement. I tested it out with my gmail account and set drafts to be saved on the ipad, and they get now saved to both the ipad and gmail server. I think with POP3 it just gets saved on the ipad.

After some frustation, I finally noticed (dah) if I go to Accounts (listed under Mailboxes, looks like just a repeat of Mailboxes) instead of Mailboxes and I tap on the email address, detailed folder show up, there are the drafts, the notes, the sent items, etc. Why was this so difficult?

I still doesn't work for me. I can't see my dissapeared emails in there still?

Let's make sure you are looking in the right place. Click on the mail icon and get to where it shows Mailboxes on the left top. Under that there is "Inboxes" like a header and under the inboxes it shows one line for each email account you have set up. Further down there is another header called Accounts. Under accounts it lists the email accounts again.

When you select an email address from the accounts, that is where it shows sent items, drafts and Trash.

Worked for me! Thank you!

Dear All,

I have recently experienced the same issue.

Mal created, send pressed, not in drafts, not in outbox, certainly not with the recipient.

I have hard reset, powered down for a long period but not yet, deleted and recreated the accounts.

I am not seeing a solution in this thread, am I missing something?

My two accounts are POP.

Any ideas?

Bob

THANK YOU Autrement!!!

Your solution just saved me a great deal of future frustration with an easy solution rig at my fingertips! It just took me two seconds and I already tested it!

I was having issues saving ANY draft. It acted like it was saving the draft, showing a progress bar, and then nothing, anywhere, ACK.

Now, problem solved!! :)

Bernie

I've had a disappeared draft as well, last night. I had begun composing it on mail.app, on my laptop, and then I made edits on my iPad and chose "Save." It's not in the trash or anywhere else, and I've also looked in mail.app on my laptop and tried my provider's webmail interface.

I've seen other threads where people lost mail in other folders as well. (But who knows if this is the same or a different issue, or a related one.)

So, after trying a variety of fixes (including everything mentioned here), I've deleted the account from my iPad: I don't trust the app enough to give it any access to my account at this point.

I'm running iOS 5.1 on an iPad 3 and using IMAP. I had only one mail account.

Hi all, I just had a similar problem. I took a draft in my drafts folder, modified it and pressed send. I got a pop up saying "cannot send mail - check the settings for the outgoing servers ....." and my e-mail just seems to have disappeared. And, of course, it was an important one. The big question is where can I find it? I have searched all mail folders and there is no sign of it. If anyone has advice I would be most grateful. Cheers

Sorry to say, but I suspect it is simply gone. In my case looked everywhere and even had my email provider restore all my recently deleted email—the one I lost was nowhere to be found.

At this point, I am simply keeping open a tab in Safari with my webmail set to auto-login.

These things are still an issue with some randomeness to it.

It seems the mail settings on the server account matter alot. For instance, I can find my work mail drafts and open them. Unfortunately they open as inbox mails not allowing me to edit and send, but forward and reply, which isn't very useful!

I took the advice of Autrement and had to take it one step further to fix the problem as all my settings were already showing that drafts were being saved to the server as opposed to on my iPad. I went into settings as described and changed the setting to on my iPad and then back again to on the server and everything works fine now thankfully. I "lost" two very important e-mails before I read this thread and Autrement's solution so THANK YOU for suggesting the fix.

I had the same issue, I looked in all my email accounts! I finally decided to look in ICloud folder, then in drafts and all my drafts were strangely all there!

So I don't if it depends on if your draft has an attachtment, but I found all my missing drafts in there.

This thread is obviously old now and I'm sure all of you will have solved your lost draft email problems and moved on. But it's the closest subject matter to the issue I have been having so here goes...

Like many of you, I thought I had saved an email (happened to be a very long one which had taken me absolutely ages to put together but I was still researching info for) then couldn't find it a couple of hours later. I did a search for an unusual word in the "lost" email and found it ... in Drafts ... but dated 16 September 2012, and I was doing the email last Sunday, 20 January 2013! I didn't even have the iPad last September! Two things:

If any of you can't find a draft anywhere, try looking down the folder in case it is nestling amongst drafts of months ago (maybe you don't have any old drafts in your folder as I do, though). Or try searching for an uncommon word you might have used in it (ie not a word that will bring up lots of emails).

Does anyone know why an email might suddenly give itself a random date of weeks earlier? I have since "lost" another email and found it again (this time dated August 2012) so I would love to know how to stop this annoying glitch.

When I eventually finished the emails and sent them, they showed in my Sent items with the correct date of sending.

I was writing an article on a really tight deadline. I started it on my computer but then I had to travel, so I saved the text as a draft e-mail in GMail, then opened it up on my iPad. I finished the article, hit send, and it popped up with an SMTP error, and then the article was GONE. No Outbox folder, not in Drafts or Sent Mail. This is the first time I have attempted to use the iPad for anything productivity related. It will be the last, too. I am really unhappy to see that Apple has had cause to know about this issue since 2010 and it still hasn't been addressed.

Had iPad 2 with iOS 5 - no problem at all for years in a row. Never lost an email.

Just bought iPad 3 with iOS 6 - drafts / outbox disappear with no reason.

I was typing emails from an airplane and hitting send (disconected). When connected, I expected to have my e-mails sent, but they was just vanished. No one received it and they are not on my iPad or Gmail server.

By the way, if you try to add a Exchange Gmail account, apparently it is not supported by Google anymore.

Several business emails was lost and never reached detination until I noticed the problem.

IPAD BECAME UNTRUSTABLE FOR WORK!

This problem is really severe and should be THE most important fix ever.

Can I trust anything else on my iPad? Notes? Photos? Apps?