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

I just had something very much the same happen. I had a draft I have kept for years adding important links etc to for safe keeping in Gmail. I opened this draft to grab some info the other day on my Ipad 4. I went to access it again today and its gone. Its not in the trash. Its not in the draft folder. Cant find it. Very frustrating..

This is appaling.

I just lost my university application for my masters course because of this problem.

I am appaled Apple - all high-gloss on the outside - rubbish; not-a-single-f given when it comes to things like these.

Millions of people use your software. Get it right.

Putting iPad on ebay, it's obviously just a toy, made to make people buy apps.

STILL having the same problem with my iPad 3. I TOTALLY agree that it's absurd that Apple hasn't addressed such a long standing issue. The worst part is I never know if the mail went through or didn't! It will show up in my sent items folders on both the iPad and the phone even though it hasn't been sent in reality. The only way I KNOW it will be sent is if I re send it from my phone. VERY frustrating!

This is an iOS problem, not an iPad problem.

This problem is affecting a lot of people.

I'm sure the person who wrote the Gmail sync code at Apple, did their job fine.

I'm sure the person who wrote the code for local backups, did their job fine too.

The person who was supposed to write code to check that either of these things really does happen before hibernating/quitting the app - well, evidently this person does not exist.

Apple you have Billions. I know you need reserves, but please hire 1 guy who does nothing but use your products, and write down all the bugs that your regular engineers and testers will mark 'not a bug'. Give him his own bug tracker and let your managers hand them out to the departments.

Hire 1 guy for every product line, and you might stay on top.

This problem is only happening on my iPad in my case. My iPhone 4S has no issues what so ever when it comes to mail and both are running the current iOS?

Again I agree that Apple should have engineers who do nothing but use their products and when an obvious bug such as this appears, ADDRESS IT! I won't even go into the nice little swoosh sound that "says" your mail HAS been sent when in fact it has not.

For me this problem has been going on for over a year now. Since they now have competition with their actual product line, they need to step it up in the customer service end or this loyal Apple user is going to be looking elsewhere when my current contract is up.

I have experienced this problem on a few occasions over the last few months, the most recent occurrence being when I lost 2 emails yesterday, after which I decided to Google it to see if I was alone. Evidently I am not alone (there are also lots of other threads on it in the Apple support forums and elsewhere) and now I see the scale of the issue and the fact that it has been going on for years, I am absolutely appalled at Apple's apparent indifference and/or incompetence.

All of my lost emails have happened whilst using my work email account, which is an Exchange account. I compose the email, send it and it seems to go. However, on checking Sent Items there is no sign of the email, it is not in Drafts, nor Trash and when I check with the recipient they confirm they have not received it. In one particular case the email was very long and took me half an hour to compose, at which point the iPad almost went out of the window.

Mine is an iPad 2 and the issue has occurred in both iOS 6 and iOS 7.

Apple sorely needs a major kick up the backside for not dealing with this. Coincidentally, I was considering upgrading my iPad 2 to the new iPad, but now I know the scale of this problem there is no way I would consider using an iPad for work purposes until Apple confirms the issue is fixed. I was also considering buying 10 or so iPad Minis to equip some of my staff, but I will now not be doing so.

Can I check if it was an e-mail you started composing on your desktop and then returned to in your iPad to finish and send? That was the scenario when I lost the article I was composing in a hurry on a deadline.

I've installed the GMail app on my iPad and I'm going to see if it does the same thing. Will report back.

No, I started, finished and sent each of the emails in question on the iPad. In each case, I did not save the email as a draft and then return to it, I just wrote it and sent it (or rather, I thought it had sent!).

Also, it has happened to me both on Wi-Fi and mobile data.

Yesterday, I deleted the Exchange account and recreated it from new, so I'll se if that has any effect, although it could take a while for me to find out because the issue only seems to occur every 2 or 3 months.

Yesterday, while I was at work invigilating at an art gallery, I spent 6 hours working on a piece of text in an email on my new iPad 4, saving it as a draft when it was time to close up. Today I wanted to finish off the text and it has disappeared!!!! I am totally gutted. I have been searching everywhere for traces of the document, but it appears to have gone completely. And it really does make things absolutely worse to discover that so many people have experienced this problem before me, notifying Apple through their own troubleshooting discussions page, only for the issue to apparently be completely ignored! Do Apple have no interest in reading through these messages? Have they put this forum here just for us to all wallow in the misery of our complaints with their products? Without their help on the matter this will not be resolved. I was given this recent model of iPad for my birthday, and despite there being no office software like Word available, thought that the problem could be resolved by composing texts in email draft and transferring these to Word via my PowerBook when at home, but within days of getting the iPad I am sorely disappointed with it.

How can Apple have allowed people to be complaining of this problem with their product for so many years and done nothing about it!?

I absolutely agree with the last post. Three years and no fix nor any acknowledgement from Apple. How arrogant. To think I chose Apple over competition because believed it to be bug free!

I have hardly any emails on this Ipad which is on IOS7 and is an Ipad4. Not set up any other email accounts so mine is a blank canvas. Twice have composed an email, clicked Cancel (silly choice of name for leading you to a next step where you get to Save) in order to choose Save to Drafts. Trouble is I have NO DRAFTS folder anywhere let alone any contents within it.

I will now try fiddling with Settings and report back if it works.

Grrrh"..........

Ok good news and thanks to whoever suggested this workaround originally.

I went into Settings and selected Mail, Contacts, Calendars. I hit its button so it was "Off" exited and pressed Mail on home screen. This asked me to set up a mail account as if completely new. Just ignored this and returned to Settings and turned Mail on again (green).

Back to Home screen, hit Mail and hey presto I have a Draft Folder displayed for the first time and my saved drafts are there.

Relief but wish Apple would sort this glitch. Hope this sorts out someone else!

Hi there!

It sounds like you're having a more complicated problem than I was, but just in case anyone out there is in the same boat, here's the solution (which I wasn't able to find in any forums thus far) to a simple problem I was having.

If you're using a single email account with iOS 7 on a device like an iPad 2, you've hit the cancel button on an email and selected "Save Drafts," but later realized that you're unable to find the draft folder anywhere, then the fix is actually pretty simple. All you have to do is open your email account, hit the "Mailboxes" tab in the top left corner, tap the "Edit" button (to the right of the "Mailboxes" header), select "Add Mailbox" from the first section, and then just tap "Drafts" and "Done."

Afterwards, just go to your Mailboxes tab and you should see the draft folder listed, in which will be whatever drafts you've saved so far.

Hope that's helpful! :)

I have been having the same problem of disappearing drafts. My settings on iPad were already using the Drafts folder on the server.

Here is what I found: my drafts from Yahoo have been ending up on Gmail. I primarily use Yahoo for mail, but have both accounts set up on my iPad. After reading this thread, I logged into Gmail and found several of my "missing" Yahoo drafts were in my Gmail Drafts folder.

I have had it happen before where I replied to a Yahoo email on my iPad that somehow my reply was sent out from Gmail instead of Yahoo, but I assumed I had accidentally clicked on the "From" line and changed it. This is definitely not the case on the Draft issue. I started an email on Yahoo from my PC and saved the draft. Then I made a change to the draft email on the iPad, and it vanished from Yahoo drafts. Now I found it in Gmail drafts. I see that my "default account" under "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" settings was Gmail, but that should not make it switch over an email that started on another account.

Hope this helps someone.

Whenever I have something go wrong on Mail I quit Mail like I describe below and then reset my iPad.

Double click the Home button to show the screen with running and recently used apps. Each app icon will have a sample page above it. Flick up on the page (not the app icon) and the page will fly away and the app icon will disappear. This quits that app. Then reset your device. Press and hold the Home and Sleep buttons simultaneously until the Apple logo appears. Let go of the buttons and let the device restart. That usually fixes your problem.

Hahaha.. iOS code is such a mess. I just bought a 100$ android tablet and it does everything my iPad (which if you read a few posts back, I sold) did, without needing to jailbreak and hack it. It also has not yet lost an email. I advise everyone to throw their iPad on ebay and get an android tablet from a reputable hardware company. Use the extra cash and treat yourself to dinner.