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

I'm sure that would work, but why make it complicated?! :-)

I went to the account which had the phantom unread e-mails, went up to the search box and entered "unread" and the 2 phantom e-mails that had been bothering me 'magically' appeared!  I simply clicked on both of them and no longer have any phantom e-mails.

Go to mail settings and make sure that your account is  a pop account and not imap. I t worked for me.

I must of tried every trick aforementioned and nothing worked until I did the following:

1. Back up to Cloud

2.Go to settings

3.Tap General

4. Scroll down to Reset

5. Tap Erase all content and settings

Then Back up and the Unread numbers will be gone.

Your the man :-) Cheers mate !!

My inbox indicated three thousand plus phantom unread emails.   I did your trick with what really was in my inbox and it worked!  Thank you!!

Here is a much simpler way that woked for me.

1) send yourself a 'test' email.

2) open it

3) press edit

4) mark all as read

5) Highlight and delete.

6) back out (you may have even more 'ghost emails at this stage. don't worry

7) repeat steps 1-6. you should have no 'ghosts'

I lost you after instruction number 3).

Sorry...not really tech savy instructions.

so, after pressing 'edit' the 'mark all as read' option should display. press that, then delete, and, 'done'.

for some reason this doulbled the number of 'pantom' emails on my phone (a 5) but repeating the whole process erased them all. make sense?

The 'Search 'unread' suggestion is probably easier in hindsight.

I think I solved the phantom email issue:

I just sent an email to the account that showed unread messages via my computer, then opened it on iphone and marked 'all read', all 606 unread messages have now disappeared. Finally!!

I have been bothered by this for MONTHS! I tried everything...YOUR option was the ONLY thing that worked..cant thank you enough!!!

thank you so much

Pro61 - this solution worked for me. Thanks so much!

Worked for me.  Thanks!

Thanks a bunch, this worked

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...

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.