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

I had this issue with my hotmail account. It was only fixed by deleting the account off the phone, then readding it as an outlook account (i manually set it up last time), by adding it as an outlook email account the issue has now gone. Good luck out there!

I Had this issue a day ago. Delete your mail account which one is showing incorrect number of unread email from settings.

Restart the Device.

Add new mailbox account again.

ENter your credentials.

Refresh your mailbox.

Problem resolved.

You can also type in the search on your inbox (unread) and start the search, the phantom emails then appear and you can either tap them as if you wanted to read them or delete them. WARNING !!!!!!! Deleting them will delete the original message so insure they are not important

I had the account showing one email unread when in fact there were no emails in my inbox, or in fact anywhere else. I had cleared them all out, including the deleted items and sent items: there were really zero messages left in my account, but according to my iPhone 4, of the zero messages, one was still unread!.

We conclude therefore, that it is an unresolved bug. I did go into settings and turned mail on and off and reset the phone and that did clear it, so there is a workaround for the iPhone 4 at least.

HI guys haven't read all 200 posts but what worked for me was to go to mail account and reduce number of days to sync email in my case no limit down to 1 day dropped back into email and refreshed phantom disappeared then reset back to no limit.

SImple and fast and problem has not reappeared.

thanks for all the advice above and hope this adds and helps some

I found a more appropriate solution..

Go to your inbox and try to search for emails by pulling the email inbox screen down

On the search field instead of giving an real word to look up for, simply start typing "unread" and it will autosugest to show all unread emails. Click on that and you'll get those phantom unread emails on your screen. Mark them as read and that's it!

Please go through my solution.. It's not hard to do this every time it happens:

Go to your inbox and try to search for emails by pulling the email inbox screen down

On the search field instead of giving an real word to look up for, simply start typing "unread" and it will auto suggest to show all unread emails. Click on that and you'll get those phantom unread emails on your screen. Mark them as read and that's it!

Same issue here - happened after doing a search on that particular mailbox (an exchange server).

Switching mail off/on for that account didn't work here.

Sending myself an email did work however.

Go to Settings / Mail

Choose the mail account with the issue

Turn mail Off and let it unload for a minute

Turn mail back On and those unreads should be gone

Bingo!

Thanks vegasrebelfan!! Searched my name in "to" field and found a message that didn't previously appear in my inbox. "Read" that message and counter now reset to zero.

----CRAZY BUT WORKED---Search "unread"

In email, I searched for "unread".

One old spam email showed up.

I opened it.

Went back to home screen.

Poof, gone.

Thank you, [b]Pro61[/b].

In my case, the ghost e-mails were in two different accounts. I sent myself two e-mails, one to each account, chose "Mark All As Read", and that was the end of it.

The solution is to go into the email folder that has the unread emails , select edit then "mark all as unread" then wait 5 second, and edit "mark all as read" and this will resolve your problem.

The following worked for me.

Go to Settings

Select Mail, Contacts, Calendars

Go to your email account

Turn off Mail

Reboot your iPad/iPhone

Go back and turn on Mail.

jsiddo (response from page 2) - Three and a half years later it worked for me! (sending email to myself using account showing unread message) Thanks! 🙂