'No Limit' option under Mail Days to Sync disappeared

My first post. I could not help but set up my user account and reply as this has been driving me nuts.

iPhone 4S and iPad 2 both now with 5.1 iOS.

Same thing, where did the Mail Days To Sync No Limit option go.

Through much painstaking dead end research, I think ai have a conclusion on my end.

I use GoDaddy exchange email and I believe they have pushed a server restriction out on the users. I have not got them to admit this as their support in exchange dept says they have had other calls on this but get no answers from the engineers or devs.

This appears to be the source as this option still exists with other accounts so it cannot be an iOS thing.

I have found a workaround, at least for the moment my entire mailbox, subfolders and all, appears to be operating under the no limit rule, which is a necessity for my business. How could anyone think restricting this option without reporting such to the customer is a good idea?

I'm not sure which one did the trick but here are the steps I used to get it back functioning. It was a little more stubborn on the iPad because every time I wold recreate the account, it defaulted to 3 Days.

Step 1: toggle off SSL in account settings. It warns you that you may not be ale to send or receive email after it fails to verify your account (at last with GoDaddy Exchange). Save in this state anyhow. You will notice your mailbox disappears. Go back into options and turn SSL back on. Check Mal Days To Sync. On iPhone it defaulted to no option selected. Leave like this! It is the equivalent of No Limit. As soon as you select a limiting option it can not be undone, unless in theory you repeat these steps.

Step 2: On iPad this did not do the trick because it kept defaulting to 3 Days option. Do not delete your exchange account, but rather de-select Mail option from syncing. This blows out your mailbox but the option for no limit returns. Select No Limit. Turn mail back on.

Step 3: forget this ever happened and go back to enjoying your older email messages on your mobile devices.

Please post feedback if this worked for you. I could not find anything on this anywhere so felt obligated to share. I'd like to see if it helps anyone with the same issue.

Also please state in reply who hosts our exchange server. It would be interesting to see if it is GoDaddy across the board.

Thanks for reading!

While I am not a moderator, here is a link to the other thread. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3777998?answerId=17760574022#17760574022 The only reason I know is because I answered the OP regarding settings. From what the other post states, it seems to be a GoDaddy thing. I have a regular Exchange account on my iPhone 4S from the college I work at and I am on iOS 5.1. it still has the No Limit option, so it appears it is a setting from GoDaddy.

Glad it worked. It is interesting to see you are a GoDaddy customer also.

It has to be forced from the exchange server side because the option reappears until it connects to their server.

I see there are other threads on this now. Perhaps an admin or moderator can combine the threads or redirect members posting to the other threads to my solution?

@Justin Witz: The phrase No Limit appeared for a short period of time after I fixed it on the iPad, but never on the iPhone. After a little syncing with the server the option disappeared and left it blank - unselected.

@ChrisJ4203: Thanks.

I am a barnd new convert from BB and am having the same go daddy/iphone issue in that I cant "no limit" option to appear. I tried as suggested above to no avail. To be clear i went inot setting, exchange, account , turned off "use SSL", saved it, then when back in and turned "Use SSL" back on. I dont see where it defaults to a no option selected - the one month is still checked off. Am I missing a step? Thanks!

Try the subsequent step listed above that I had to take for my iPad.

- disable Mail syncing and save. No Limit should reappear. Select it. Turn your mail sync back on. Go to Mail app and sync your folder and see if your older messages are there. Leave the Mail Days To Sync field alone as it will immediately or at some point appear blank. The moment you select one of the limiting options it is saved and cannot go back without (in theory) redoing these workarounds. I am not going to be messing with mine - unless I have to reinstall the exchange account (which I have to do from time to time) becasue it gets real quirky.

Curse you GoDaddy! I cannot believe they would push this 1 month max mail sync limit out to their users without ddsclosure or admission.

GoDaddy exchange hosting it is. I called them on it after i added my jobs exchange account and saw that "No Limit" was avaialble but of course they denied any changes to their systems. Their only answer was they don't support iOS. I've been struggling when trying to reference older messages but now thanks to this post I'm getting all messages. Thanks!

I'm an Exchange Admin and we noticed this also disappeared when setting up one of our users. We noticed immediately after setting up the account you can go back into the mail settings and No Limit will be there. However, once the option for "Mail Folders to Push" appeared, it lost the option for "No Limit' but still functioned the same. We've tried this on iOS 5, 5.0.1 and 5.1.1 and had the same issue. We did not change anything on our Exchange Servers and did work fine before. Maybe something Apple changed in iOS 5 for Exchange accounts?

Happy to continue to hear that this solution helps!

@MessagingTech - others have reported no issues or changes post iOS 5, so I canot think this is an iOS quirk.

Oddly, you are the first and only NON Go Daddy Exchange user of the bunch... Glad you got it sorted for your users.

It was in fact a policy issue on our end. Apparently there were multiple policies being applied to different users besides our "default one" which was caused the issue. It was interesting to see that even though the policy said to limit to 30 days, if you set it up prior to the policy taking effect, the no limit option stays in place.

Thank you for the update MessagingTech.

I wish Go Daddy would investigate their own server policies and make the fix so that users do not end up limited to 30 day sync. Heck I regularly reference year old message. If you have the available server space, there should never be a limit unless the user chooses that limit themselves.

That would be my admin policy. I have a 4GB mailbox and use only like 500MB of it. There should be no reason to limit my Exchange syncing on my smartphone by age of message.

I'm curious to see if someone can bypass this "Go Daddy" policy by setting the "no limit" option before their policies take effect? What I encountered was if immediately after adding the account I went back into the sync options and "No Limit" was there. As soon as the Exchange policies hit, I lost the option but "No Limit" is still in effect.

We decided to keep it at 30 days because are users can have very large mailboxes (going back several years) so our admin did not want someone downloading gigabytes of email over their 3G or 4G connection or filling their phone storage with their mail and complaining that they were out of room for music or apps.

This essentially does seem to work. As long as you set it immediately to no limit it will remain in effect after the option disappears. Problems only seem to arise if you go back and select a limiting option.

The only way to then change it back is the previously mentioned suggestions... Up to and including deleting and re-adding the exchange account.

This is actually not a problem with the iOS, we have recently learned with our internal exchange server that the e-mail sync setting is an policy issue on the exchange side, once we upped it to one month then checked the iphone and the one month option appeared. So again check your exchange policies, this is NOT an iOS problem, and the reason they did remove it in iOS 5+ was because this was causing crashes on exchange servers.

@Zhakathoom, I am glad you were able to finally get where you wanted to go with your sync.

Do you use Go Daddy for Exchange Hosting by chance?

I am beginning to think Go Daddy has other issues in addition to this - at least with my iOS devices and syncing always hanging up downloading messages from the server.