Phantom unread emails: Mail shows 5 unread messages, but there are none...

After reading all the posts regarding this issue (yeah I read them all), the only thing that worked for me was actually deleting my email account from my iphone and setting it up again. No more ghosts emails after that, so I recommed before doing anything else, deleting your email account from iphone, shutting off and restarting iphone and then adding email address again. Wish I would have done this from the get go...

Same problem as you on my iPhone 5c ver 9.0.1 and your solution didn't work, but thanks

for the offering. Anyhow, found another forum online and their solution worked as follows - in mailbox click on Edit,

Mark All 'unread' as 'read', exit out, and go back in....voila, cleared!

Three years later (October 2, 2015) and your solution still solves the problem.....who knew. Thanks!

This SIMPLE solution is: go to settings, then open "Mail, Contacts, Calendar", touch and open "outlook". The first box should be Mail and green should be showing. Turn it off.....wait a couple minutes and turn it back on. That will do it. No recreating mail etc., etc. waaayyyyy too complicated. This is simple and it works.

Regards all......

Perfect worked for me I had 2 phantom messages for weeks. I turned just mail off for my exchange account and then closed the mail app and when back into setting, mail and turn mail for that account back on and that forced a sync. Fixed!

Yes this also worked for me!

1. In settings turn off the offending mail account

2. Power down phone (I did this with holding down power and the home button to reset the phone - you don't lose anything like music etc)

3. Turn phone back on

4. Turn the email account back on in settings

This DID cause my phone to re-read the messages and the count is corrected. Previously, I have had "Junk Mail" of 2 and it was like that for months. Now I have no number showing. At last!!

MY problem was a little more stubborn. I had to disable mail sync temporarily and reboot the phone. If I just turned mail sync off and back on it still showed one unread phantom message. Once I rebooted and then turned mail sync back on the phone redownloaded all the emails and didn't show the one unread anymore. This is under mail and accounts, go to the account and then switch mail off. This will remove all the emails from the account but when switched back on will redownload them.

I check my email on a daily and regular basis. I had 1 phantom email that was driving me nuts! And it wouldn't go away despite weeks of trying different things to get rid of it. Settings>Mail>Off. Turn off and restart the iPhone. Settings>Mail>On. The phantom email is now gone. Here is an image of the pesky phantom email before I called ghostbusters on the settings. Thanks for sharing the awesome advice!

Hey, I recently had this problem with my iPhone 5C. I have my gmail & outlook email accounts linked to my Mail app and for ages my gmail inbox on it claimed to have "unread" emails that, no matter how hard I tried to search for, I just couldn't seem to find!

But, THANK GOODNESS, I have also very recently SOLVED this issue.

Here is my advice to you!

IF IT IS YOUR "GMAIL" ACCOUNT ACTING UP;

-Go onto a/your COMPUTER and go to your gmail

-in the SEARCH BAR, type in (without the apostrophes) 'is:unread' and then press enter/click search

-IF THERE REALLY IS ANY UNREAD EMAILS, IT WILL POP UP and you can mark them as read!

-refresh your Mail app and check to see if that changes anything.

I hope this works for you, because it did for me and I feel so relieved.

If turning your email account off and on again (also restarting your phone while doing this) doesn't fix the issue, as was the case with my phone. Try the below method that worked for me;

Go into Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Select the problem account -> Scroll to the bottom and delete the account from the device.

Turn off the device, and turn it back on again.

Now go ahead and add the email account back to the device and you should be clear of phantom notifications.

It is a little bit more hassle, but it did the job for my iPhone 6 running iOS 9.3.2 as of posting this reply.

Hope this helps at least someone.

C

There's a real easy and fast fix to this.

1. Open your Inbox,

2. Select "Edit" in top right hand corner.

3. Select "Mark all" at bottom left and choose "Mark all as unread"

4. Select "Edit" again

5. Select "Mark all" and "Mark all as read"

It just worked for me. Good luck!

Hi there,

I think I may have found the problem. I too suffered from inaccurate message count in Mac Mail for months and it was making me bananas. If you sort by unread, you'll notice that notes you've created will show up first. At least it did for me as I often create notes from my iPhone and they sync with my mail client. I went through all of the notes and watched the message counter clear itself.

Hope this info is helpful. I'm so glad to see my ACTUAL email count.

I have had this problem many times and I am not certain what causes it,but I do know how to fix it. From mail, click on the mail account that has the phantom unread e-mails. Go to the mailbox tab across the top menu, then select rebuild. This rebuilds the mailbox from your IMAP account and has fixed the problem for me everytime.

I found a fix (and cause) for my iPad (version 3). The problem was caused when I changed my password, per company time requirements, on all my devices except my exchange email client. During this time, I read mail in my desktop app. When I correct the iPad exchange password, it was out of sync (showing 8 unread messages in my inbox).

To fix it, I:

1. Opened iPad Settings
2. Selected Mail, Contacts, Calendars
3. Selected Exchange
4. Turned mail OFF
5. Selected Done
6. Exited Settings and saw mail was empty
7. Opened iPad Settings
8. Selected Mail, Contacts, Calendars
9. Selected Exchange
10. Turned mail ON
11. Selected Done
12. Exited Settings (noted that mail still showed incorrect unread number)
13. Opened Mail
14. Forced a sync by dragging inbox contents down
15. Messages read was resync'd

Hope this helps others.

Tom

Double tap on your home button to bring up any open apps. Touch the minus sign on the mail app to close it, then return to your home screen. Next go to settings on your iphone and touch Mail. Touch the account that's having the issue to open its email settings. Swipe Mail to "off" and let the phone cycle through the off process. Once its complete, swipe back to "On". Your email should be set back to 0.