Why is Mail only showing oldest iCloud mail messages?

I had this same problem migrating my messages from Gmail to iCloud, and got an answer from Apple telephone support.

The support guy explained that the Mail app on iOS is showing you the 50 recent messages as they appeared in iCloud i.e. Mail is using the timestamp of when the message appeared in iCloud to determine the most recent emails to show you; it's not using the sent/received date.

I tested this out and it holds true. When I use Mail.app on my Mac to copy all the messages from a folder on Gmail to iCloud, Mail seems to start copying from the newest messages and finishes with the oldest. It follows that iCloud timestamps the newest emails first and the oldest last. So, when Mail on iOS works out which emails to show you, as it's going by the timestamp, it shows you the oldest (most recently timestamped in iCloud) first.

I also tested it this way: if I have 100 emails in a folder, ordered by date received from newest to oldest, and then copy messages 51-100 first, followed by messages 1-50, then messages 1-50 display in the Mail app on iOS, as they were timestamped most recently.

I said to the support guy that this seemed counterintuitive - he agreed and said he'd submit feedback to that effect and encouraged me to do the same - which I'm certainly going to do!

Hi. I have the same problem with my iPad after uploading local emails to the iCloud server. I have emails going back to 1998 and those are showing as the most recent. I set the iPad to display the most recent 1000, which results in the most recent one being closer to the present, but still several years old. So I have been clicking "Load More Messages" at the bottom of the message list which results in 25 more emails at a time being loaded, starting from the past and moving toward the present. It seems that these remain loaded in the list even if I quit the and restart the Mail program on the iPad, or indeed, even if I restart the iPad. However I have 8000 emails in this folder and am worried that this might slow down the iPad. Is there really no way to have the email sort by date regardless of when they were uploaded to the server. I'm seriously considering deleting them from the server the re-uploading them, oldest first, so the time stamp will be correct. (I assume that if I sort a local email folder on my Mac to show oldest first before uploading, that the newest will then upload last and therefore have the most recent time stamp.)

Any more insight would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

As far as I'm aware there's no way to change what Mail on iOS considers 'recent'.

However, reversing the sort order in Mail on the Mac before copying the emails seems to work - I just did it with 60 messages and the most recent 50 were displayed :).

I didn't pursue the issue with the telephone support guy, partly because I just wanted to make sure it wasn't broken, or i was doing something wrong, and partly because I wanted to make sure it wouldn't continue with future messages. Indeed, new messages (i.e. those sent to iCloud or those you create) appear at the top of the list, as you would expect. So, after 50 new messages, you won't see the reverse-sorted imported ones anyway - unless you change the number of recent messages displayed.

I'm going to re-import my emails after reverse sorting them, largely because I only imported a few hundred to test with in the first place. If you've got 8000 messages, I might not bother, bearing in mind how they'll drop off the list after a while anyway... unless it really bugs you, in which case I guess you'll need to reimport them too (I'd just make sure it works with 100 or so messages first).

Message was edited by: bdlane

Thanks for your reply. I think I did find a solution, which is a hybrid of ideas I've read here. Since the messages had all already been uploaded to iCloud, I went to my iCloud account using Safari, and created an empty folder. I then moved all the messages from the folder I wanted to re-sort, and moved all the messages into it. BUT FIRST, change the sort order in that folder so the oldest is listed first. It apears that when I moved all the messages into this new folder, iCloud puts a new time stamp on it. SInce you want the oldest message to have the oldest time stamp, you have to sort the folder with the oldest first because iCloud moves the items starting at the top of the list. So the newest messages at the bottom of the list will be moved last, thus having the most recent time stamp. For some reason, iCould marks some or all of them as unread after you move them, so if you don't want them to display that way, select all the messages in the folder and under the actions drop down (the gear icon), mark them as read. If you don't do this before going to the iPad, they will show as unread there, and it's much harder to mark them as read on the iPad. I then went to the iPad and opened the corresponding folder, and it loaded the messages in the proper order, with the newest listed first.

For some reason, however, regardless of what setting I choose for how many messages the iPad should show (50, 100, 200, etc.) it displays all of them. Of course it won't actually load them unless you scroll way down in the list to show the older messages. But I can live with that.

You can then go back to iCloud (on Safari) and delete the folder you emptied out for the move, and change the name of the folder you moved the messages into back to the original name. This is faster than actually moving all the messages again.

As I understand the problem here, the time stamp issue will continue to plague any older emails that you decide to upload to the server. So after resorting and reuploading your mailboxes, and additional emails you upload will appear in the "most recent" regardless of their actual date?

Yeah, you solution seems to be simple and it actually works as expected. It ridiculous how engineers in Apple handle emails. Anyway, thanks for the fix!

Sorry for push this old thread but: You made my day!

This issue still persists and I currently move all my GMail's to iCloud using Mail on Mavericks.

On the iPhone, I have exactly this issue.

Re-order and move via Mail on Mac seem to not working fine. After that, I've tested it via Safari with my "Sent" folder. Looks perfectly now, Inbox still outstanding 😉.

Thank you!