Unable to move message to Trash

Not sure how far back this works but on iPhone 6 / iOS 8, setting up the IMAP Path Prefix to INBOX or Inbox didn't work out for me.

What worked out though, on that same Setup > Mail, > Account > Advanced page is to map the various mailboxes listed at the top of the page to those of my email account (right slide). Hope this helps.

Calgary2012

There was an exchange server interruption and it orphaned a bunch of e-mails in my Iphone exchange inbox (they were gone from my PC inbox/trash folders). I could not delete them out of my Iphone Inbox. To remove them I did 3 steps (not sure which one did it) Set my Iphone email account to "Mail days to sync" to only 1 day. On my PC I preformed an outlook send/recieve all. Then on my Iphone mailboxes --> accounts I went to the exchange --> Inbox then selected the edit button. Selected the messages that won't delete, then selected the mark button and answered "Mark as Unread" and the messages dissappeared.

I was trying to figure out my husband's latest email issue (their IT dept are about useless) with his Exchange email and this did it! As I was confirming what I was doing would be ok with him (ie, just in case I lost some messages on there), he mentioned they shut down a bunch of servers the other day due to a virus-- that'd certainly count as an interruption! I set it to synch to 1 day and *poof*, all the junk he wanted gone was gone! Then I went and resynched it to 1 month (his preference) and the messages he wanted to keep came back (as they should have, really)

In case any steps matter, I'm rather sure he had deleted the useless stuff (his job sends out a lot of garbage) from his Outlook account via his Mac, and it was the iPhone that wouldn't delete them at this point. So I think the synching to the one day is what cleared up the stuff he wanted gone.

This definitely works. Nice job all

I fixed this by changing the Trash selection under Advanced Settings* to "On The Server" instead of "On My iPhone"

* Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars>Your Email Account>Account>Advanced>Deleted Mailbox>

On iOS 8.x, you may need to specify which folder on the Exchange server is used for deleted items. This fix also works for IMAP Servers:

Settings App > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > [Account Name] > Account > Advanced > Deleted Mailbox. The last window lets you specify which folder on the mail server is used as the trash folder.

I Just found that for me it happens when it is 'All mailboxes' that is selected. For individual boxes moving to trash works fine because it knows which trash account to use.

Thanks. This worked

Thank you so much! This did it for me on my iPhone 6.

THIS is the one that works. Very easy.

Thanks so so much for posting this. Worked like a charm. 🙂

A note to those still having a similar problem and for whom the solution of resetting accounts did not work (as it did not for me).

I had this problem with a particular email account on all my devices, once of which had iOS7 and another iOS8. Couldn't delete messages as described in the original question. The problem turned out to be that the Apple mail tries to move the deleted messages to the local Trash folder by default, and my IMAP email account didn't like that. So I changed the settings to move deleted messages to a Trash folder on the server, and that fixed the problem.

To change the settings, go to "Settings" on your device, then click "Mail, Contacts, Calendar", select, the problematic mail account, click on it, then click on the name of the account again until you get to the screen "Account", which shows all the server settings. Scroll down, click on "Advanced". Once there, click on "Deleted Mailbox" and select a destination folder on the server (e.g., Trash), and NOT the Trash folder on your device.

Thanks for this explanation ! It wouldn't let me delete the Trash but I emptied the Trash and the Junk folders and problem solved ! It's 2015 and this fix pertains to my iPhone 5c using the latest IOS.

GGreat answer, this sorted out my issue with junk messages on ipad. Thank you

This method helped me as well, finally!

Thank you so much for this practical solution to a nagging issue!