Ipad disappearing inbox emails

Thanks for the feedback Martha, which matches my own observations :

- the problem appeared with iOS6, and did not exist with iOS5

- it occurs only with POP accounts, and only within the inbox folder

- emails in inbox do not disappear as long as the POP server keeps those same emails

- for POP accounts, you cannot create any custom additional folder in iOS Mail (in addition to inbox, sent, trash and draft).

Unfortunately, keeping all emails in my (multiple) POP servers is not really an option for me : the main reason I prefer POP to IMAP is that I can archive on my own machine emails from 10 years back : I have more than 26 000 emails saved on my Mac...

Furthermore, the more emails you keep into the POP server, the longer it takes for iOS Mail to check your mail : the slowdown is quite significant above 100, I cannot imagine what it would be at 26 000...

As mentioned before, the best (if counterintuitive) way I found to be sure I kept my emails on my iPad was to move them... to the trash folder !

And for that to work, you need to set the trash automatic purge to "never" in iOS/Settings/Mail/<Account>/Advanced/ for each POP account.

Obviously, the problem comes from a management of POP accounts by iOS/Mail which copies wrongly some IMAP behavior.

If this bug was not deliberately introduced by Apple in iOS6 to deprecate POP accounts, we may still have some hope for the problem to disappear in a future iOS release, by "accident" if not by design...

Hello

I stumbled on your post because I noticed that I too was having emails disappear from my iPad.

I noticed under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > under Accounts select your email account > and change the setting under Mail Days to Sync to No Limit

I believe by default it may be set to 1 Week so even though your emails are still on the server they will not longer be displayed in your inbox on the iPad.

I hope this helps.

Tony

Hi Tony,

If you read the whole thread you will see that there is no amount of Settings which will fix this problem with POP accounts : it used to work with iOS5, but not with iOS6 anymore.

Still awaiting feedback with iOS7 : since you cannot downgrade, I cannoy even test it, and there are too many things I dislike in iOS7 (icons, iTunes, etc...).

Glad you were able to fix your problem (likely you have IMAP accounts).

Yet another happy user.

IPAD 1 - had it for about 5 years. NEVER a problem. IOS 5.1.1 I never make changes to email settings, etc since everythings been working just fine for the last 5 years.

Last week, the inboxes of 3 out of 5 boxes emptied spontaneously. Not in trash, etc. Data still present on desktop box.

Some of the emails I'd been holding were 2 and 3 years old.

ALL 5 accounts are on the same server/etc. They are all POP3.

(And yes, I know POP3 is old. Don't care. )

I emailed all 3 effected accounts an email for testing and they seem to be staying around without any need for rebooting, etc.

BUT - this system is SEVERELY compromised.

1. there is NO EXPLANATION of the problem that accounts for all of the facts.

2. there is NO SOLUTION. (And reboots are not a solution...merely a deferment of when the problem will reoccur...No more than rebooting a

WINDOWS box is a fix.

3. It's a long standing problem.

4. Upgrading to newer hardware, etc. doesn't fix anything either, since I see reports of the problem on newer OS, hardware, etc.

marthafromlas cruces:

Yeah, my settings is to leave mail on servers also.

And, until a few days ago, everything worked as I expected.

I would read emails and delete them or leave them on the ipad.

I would at a later date/time read/delete/etc them with desktop box.

The emails that I'd NOT deleted on the ipad would then peacefully reside in the inbox for literally years. They were actually gone from the mail server and my desktop.

Then, a few days ago, ALL emails in 3 of 5 inboxes just - disappeared.

Now, I've sent myself a couple of emails as tests, leaving them on the ipad, but not on the mail server or desktop box.

These emails are sitting around just fine.

Ugh!

For those of you that are still having trouble with this, I have a very easy solution. Use a different program, at least for a test. I just started using an ipad and found that emails I had read on my Mac were sometimes disappearing. Sometimes not. Very frustrating. They appeared, and then disappeared. And sometimes did not appear at all. There were two week gaps between some emails. The simple fix--I used another program. Since I have an older account that is POP3 based, some of the programs would not work. I tried Molto and it worked perfectly. It is a little funky--not your normal email program, but it loaded the missing emails. It will not download all at one time if you have thousands, as I do. But it got back all the ones the IPad's mail account missed. So if your IPad email still is not working, test another program.

I am new to this discussion, but have also suddenly noticed disappearing messages, which are not on the mail website or on my pc, but flashed up briefly and then vanished on my iPad (old, but running version 9.2.1), before I had time to read them. It has only happened a few times, but a couple of those were messages I wanted to see. I have opened every single folder in the mail accounts, and they are nowhere. I have several mail accounts, and don't know if it's happening with all of them or just one. I think they are all IMAP, as that seems to be the default. I have now deleted and recreated my main address, in the hope that it won't happen again. But I have no confidence. Oh, and I always had 'ask before deleting', so have changed delete to 'never'.

A friend of mine said that her problem has been disappearing notes, which also vanish into thin air. I bet it's to do with one of the updates, which usually seem to make more problems rather than fewer.