iPad email not sending

Same thing just happened to me and I reiterate the comments and questions of the last post.

I also composed a lengthy email, addressed it and pressed send. As I am in hotel I realized I needed to resubscribe to wireless which I did. The mail seemed to have gone but I haven't received the bcc nor is in drafts outbox or sent items. There was a group I could not open. Does anyone know how to retrieve from the iPad? Is there any place a temporary copy was kept? I worked for hours on this document.

Were you sending via a MobileMe SMTP Server? You may find the following chat session with MobileMe amusing and it may explain the problem either from the IPAD Mail program or MobileMe or other "online servers" such as Google, Hotmail etc.

• I didn't have much room to write and couldn't review what I was writing.

• Customer [7:14 p.m.]:

  I composed two messages today. A new message and a reply to a message I received on my MobileMe server.

• Customer [7:14 p.m.]:

  Whatever the reason, my default SMTP for new messages was MobileMe.

• Customer [7:14 p.m.]:

  At the time I composed the messages I didn't know I was offline (I am in a hotel where I need to authenticate every 24 hours).

• Customer [7:15 p.m.]:

  I authenticated and went back online and just assumed my mail would be sent. I checked my mail and was receiving mail on all three servers.

• Customer [7:15 p.m.]:

  I realized later that the two emails I composed did not send, were not in sent items, were not in drafts, and not in "outbox"

• Customer [7:16 p.m.]:

  I then tried to recreate the problem by going offline.

• Customer [7:16 p.m.]:

  I composed a message with me.com as the server - the message did not appear anywhere after pressing send.

• Customer [7:16 p.m.]:

  not in drafts or an outbox or any other folder.

• Customer [7:16 p.m.]:

  When I went online however, the message was found in some kind of cache and sent.

• Customer [7:17 p.m.]:

  Now I'm hoping there is a way to retrieve these two messages

• Advisor [7:18 p.m.]:

  I can understand your concern with this issue. What were the subject titles of the emails you are searching for?

• Customer [7:18 p.m.]:

  I can give you an approximate time I went online.

• Customer [7:19 p.m.]:

  I believe one was called "status" and the other was "card details"

• Customer [7:20 p.m.]:

  Six hours and 40 minutes ago - roughly

• Advisor [7:20 p.m.]:

  Okay, thank you. Actually right now we are having a issue with all mail servers today. At this time, we are asking customers to use their online account at www.me.com to send and receive messages. This is a brand new issue and we are working to get this resolved as soon as possible.

• Customer [7:21 p.m.]:

  Here is my concern. The email I wrote was long and involved and to recreate it would be very difficult - do you believe this email has been permanently lost?

• Advisor [7:23 p.m.]:

  No, absolutely. If the mail was sent through MobileMe servers then it is there.

• Customer [7:23 p.m.]:

  Well that is what I'm asking - was it left in some unknown cache location on my iPad or was it transmitted?

• Customer [7:23 p.m.]:

  How would I know.

• Advisor [7:24 p.m.]:

  No, I'm talking about MobileMe servers that you would not be able to see on your iPad or in me.com. Not a Sent folder or Draft folder. We would have to retrieve the message.

• Customer [7:27 p.m.]:

  I understand that - but since I tried to recreate the problem I noticed that a message composed and sent on the ipad while offline is "saved" in an unknown location. When coming back online the mysteriously "saved" message is found by either MobileMe and Ipad and "sending" appears below the status. Of course these two emails have now been missing for almost 7 hours so I was wondering if you can confirm they are on your server.

• Advisor [7:29 p.m.]:

  We cannot see actual messages or their titles on the server. We can only see the amount of messages in each folder. They would have to searched for to pull them from the server.

• Customer [7:29 p.m.]:

  ok what is the next step - as this is time sensitive.

• Advisor [7:30 p.m.]:

  Please give me a few minutes.

• Customer [7:40 p.m.]:

  I'll be away from my computer for a few minutes as well so if you return in my absence please don't disconnect

• Advisor [7:41 p.m.]:

  Thank you for waiting. This issue requires an escalation which means a Senior Advisor will contact you within 24-48 hours through an alternate email address. Can you provide an alternate email address please?

• Customer [7:42 p.m.]:

  xxxxxxxxxx- but please - as I said this is time sensitive and 24 hours is too long...

• Customer [7:42 p.m.]:

  do you have senior advisors on chat?

• Advisor [7:43 p.m.]:

  Yes, we do but for this issue it takes 24-48 hours to retrieve the messages.

• Customer [7:43 p.m.]:

  What I need to determine is what are the chances that this email IS on your servers (high/low/unknown) - and if they are on your server will they be transmitted within a known period of time?

• Customer [7:44 p.m.]:

  Obviously the other side has not received this email even though the iPad Mail send button was pressed and then the iPad went online to send/receive mail

• Advisor [7:46 p.m.]:

  Once the Senior Advisor retrieves the messages from the servers they will be sent to you in an attachment to your alternate email address. They will not transmit the messages. They will only retrieve them.

• Customer [7:52 p.m.]:

  ok so what you are saying is that you are aware of a problem with sending from devices such as the iPad - that emails sent were not transmitted and are somehow "stuck" in a mail queue - and that if I had not noticed, no one would have informed me and I may have assumed my counter-party received my email when he hadn't? I am certain this has some severe implications for the reliability of your service and I would like to speak to someone NOW.

• Advisor [7:53 p.m.]:

  Who would you like to speak with? Do you mean through phone support?

• Advisor [7:55 p.m.]:

  Are you still there?

• Customer [7:55 p.m.]:

  Yes

• Advisor [7:55 p.m.]:

  Who would you like to speak with? Do you mean through phone support?

• Customer [7:55 p.m.]:

  With someone who will be able to address my issues immediately given that it is a fault on your side.

• Advisor [7:56 p.m.]:

  As far as retrieving the emails, that cannot be done immediately. It takes them 24-48 hours to complete that process.

• Customer [7:58 p.m.]:

  What you are NOT telling me is if my email is sitting on your server -

• Customer [7:59 p.m.]:

  Do you know for a fact that 7 hours ago your servers went down and mail was lost and held in some folders until the sender calls and asks you to retrieve them?

• Customer [7:59 p.m.]:

  Really???

• Advisor [8:00 p.m.]:

  We cannot and do not give guarantees for retrieving any information from the servers. We cannot "see" emails on the servers. It is not the same as someone opening up their account and looking at sent or unsent emails. Going into the server takes time and the emails have to be found.

• Customer [8:03 p.m.]:

  I own an internet service provider - I'm familiar with these problems. I am asking you to confirm if you indeed had such a problem.

• Customer [8:03 p.m.]:

If you own an ISP why don't you use your own email service?

If I am going to have to write a long response to an email message I use a text editor on my iPad, save the response and then copy and paste it into email. I do this regardless of the machine I am on because it doesn't take much in any email editor to accidentally delete everything you've written.

As you've seen with the above posts if mail is sent while not connected to an internet source in can result in the file going into "limbo", i.e, it is not sent, it is not saved in the sent folder and it may removed from the draft folder. This may be what happened to yours when you were cut off from your connection by the hotel service. Unless you are lucky and your files actually made it to the MM server it is unlikely you will be able to recover them and I've yet to see a solution for this under iOS, but I could be wrong and maybe someone will post here and correct me.

In my thinking it would be better in a situation where you attempt to send an email while no longer connected that a message box open telling you that and giving you options. If you agree you can go here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html and send pertinent information. The 24- 48 hours response time you were given is a standard answer from MM for any enquiry, they may actually get back to you in a shorter time frame.

Good luck, hope you were indeed able to transfer your answers to the server.

That is a very good question! I found out today that whenever you install MobileMe it selects itself as your default SMTP server! It does that even if you already have other accounts and have selected a default server. It doesn't tell you it is doing that - it just does it!

Quite naughty but the MobileMe Senior Advisor claims there is no other way. So if you are in "all inbox accounts" and start a "new message" the default will be MobileMe if you have set it up and not changed it. The Senior Advisor seemed to have confirmed that the issue "Venus" was speaking of was unrelated to my problem.

I did press "send" and when I recreate the problem pressing "send" under Mobile SMTP - the test message is not saved in any folder but it reappears when going back on line and does send - so the mystery of what happened to my message remains. I will now look for some utilities which may help me search for files left on my iPad.

It maybe that your email is being sent but is being saved in some wrong place. I was having the same issue and I think I found the answer by digging into the mail settings. This way, your email on a server should be stored on the server and not hidden in your ipad.

This would be for IMAP users....I don't know about POP

Settings

Mail, Contacts, Calenders

Click on your email address on the top of the settings page

Click on the Account button at the top (should be your email address too)

Advanced Button at the Bottom

Then you can Click on "Drafts Mailbox" "Sent Mailbox" and "Deleted Mailbox" and Specify that the checked mailboxes under these are the correct folders "On the Server" and not "On My iPad"

That way, when you send an email, it uploads itself to the server rather than being saved somewhere in the depths of your ipad.

Hope this helps! I can't believe how deeply this is buried in settings!

I am having this problem as well- was this ever resolved for this thread? A call to Apple only resulted in instructions on how to reset connection settings and a "call us back if/when it happens again". Of course it happens sporadically, seemingly when the network connection is weak, so its very hard to ever recreate the issue for a live phone call. I have so little confidence in sending mail from my iPad now that I don't want to use it for mail anymore. And even if I bcc myself on every email to see if it was sent, I still lose the mail that was sent and disappeared, and then have to retype it. Extremely frustrating.

Why is Apple not responding to this issue? This is a serious flaw that needs to be corrected immediately.

Tp