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

Works beautifully. Thank you.

So does anyone know if this is an Apple issue or is it a Microsoft Active Sync issue? Whose ever problem it is they need to fix it. It is so annoying to constantly turn off email and then turn it back on.

Thanks Joey.... This also worked for me..... I must have missed one of my email accounts when I tried it the first time.... But I was more relaxed and the second time was the charm.

Awesome, it worked, thanks much!! 🙂

I am now having what appears to be the same problem. I have a GMail account and before upgrading to iOS7 mail showed something like 14 unread messages based on the fact that Mail on the iPhone only 'looked' at the 50 most recent messages in the inbox (or any folder). After upgrading to iOS7 it now shows over 3,000 unread messages based on every single (unread) email in my GMail inbox.

I tried turning mail off and on for GMail, I tried quiting the running Mail app, I tried even deleting and re-adding the GMail account. I cannot see an option in Settings to define how many emails Mail will track. It still therefore is showing now over 3,000 unread messages.

I could mark them all read explicitely but is there any way to get iOS7 to behave as before and only monitor the last 50 messages?

Note: I am using IMAP not ActiveSync.

I have just updated to iOS7 on both my iPhone 5 & iPad Mini. I have all of my mail accounts on both items, 2 x Gmail & 3 x POP accounts.

On my iPad Mini EVERYTHING is as I expected - I had several (7) unread emails on it before upgrading & they were still there when I completed the process.

My iPhone 5 however is showing 123 unread emails for one POP account and 119 for another. I have tried all of the methods in this thread without any success.😕 😠

Any help would be really appreciated.

I figured it out. Go to your in box and open all inboxes. Then select edit from upper right. Then select mark all from bottom left, then select mark all as unread. Give it a sec and then do the same thing but select mark all as read. Then it updates and removes the mystey unread badge.😎 worked for me and have not come back.

Thanks for the update, I tried this several times ( it was one of the suggestions in the thread earlier ) without success.

What I can't understand is that prior to the upgrade every single email on my iPhone 5 had been marked as read! 😕

I have an appointment at my local Genius bar on Monday afternoon and if I don't manage to resolve it beforehand will update the thread with anything I find out. 😟

I tried this solution too - and it did not work at all.

Hmmmm, I did do a hard restart on my phone first, not sure if that will make a difference, I also made sure that online and on my mac all emails were marked as read. I tried some of the other suggestions first, but none of them worked!

I updated to iOS 7 this morning and even though my inbox only has 250 emails - NONE of which are unread - my unread count is 922. When I try the edit trick I have no unread eamils in my inbox show I don't get the option to mark all as read

Went to my account online and mark all of my emails as read.

I have tried a reset. inactivated my account then turned in back on. went into notification center and turned off badges (which removed the unread count completly), turn on alerts chnged the number of emails to show.

Nothing fixes this issue.

My next step is to delete my email account from my iPhone 5 and recreate it.

APPLE PLEASE FIX THIS ASAP!!!!!!

I just gave in and deleted by hotmail account. Then I added it via Exchange (whatever that means) .. it worked immediately and the unread issue is gone ... but it only shows the last FOUR emails and gives no option how I can access previous emails .....😮

Well, without doing anything, other than leaving my iPhone turned on in the Email application with the unread mailboxes active the phone eventually found all of the so called "unread" messages, some going back a long, long time and ones that I do recall either reading or deleting as they arrived on my phone.

All I had to do then was go back to the resective mailboxes and select them alll & mark them as read and now I have no "unread" messages on my phone ( I left this for about an hour, in which time I got a few emails that increased the unread number but cleared as normal once I'd opened them )

There's obviously a glitch in the software somewher that's causing this but mine has rectified itself 🙂

I had this same issue with a Yahoo account. After the iOS7 update it started showing showing i had 16 unread messages but when i logged in on my computer i only had 3 in my inbox and they weren't unread. Previous to that i had also cleared out every other folder to make sure it wasn't anything in there.

This is what i did to finally get it to get rid of the ghost unread messages:

Settings > Mail > Yahoo (or whatever your troubled account is) > Account: > SMTP > Primary Server > Server = off.

I backed out once screen and went into Advanced > S/MIME = On, left everything else under that as whatever the default was.

I backed out all the way to the home screen and went back in to turn on the SMTP Primary Server. When i backed out the 2nd time, the ghost messages were gone!

I'm not 100% sure what the S/MIME does or if it even helped clear the issue but since I didnt check right after i turned the server off i'm gonna assume it was also part of the solution.

Hope that helps someone out there!

Had the same problem with my yahoo account on both iphone and ipad, dis what you said and cleared problem........thanks. When i did it on ipad i didnt do the S/MIME bit and can confirm that it still worked.

Thanks again