How do I limit the number of emails displayed in iOS 7?

Nothing wrong with iOS 7.

That is the difference between POP and IMAP.

Switch to IMAP. Read messages once.

POP means you have to read the same message on EVERY device you log into.

Furthermore your sent mail is not threaded on POP.

POP is like using mail in the 90s.

That's true about POP and IMAP, Yumbo; however, IOS 6 let you control how many emails in your inbox display and that feature was missed in IOS7 I'm hoping it was just an error and they will fix it. I like to see no more than 50 emails in my inbox on my iPhone generally. If I need to look for an older email I could change that number to 100, 500, even 1,000 in IOS 6 and then I could scan more emails, then set it back to 50. Can't do that I'm IOS 7

Can't fathom why they would remove the option of limiting email volume in the inbox. Come on, Apple, reinstate this feature!

The conspiracy theorist in me makes me think that Apple did this so that having all these emails on your phone would take up TONS of more on-board memory (which it does), thus making you wish that you had bought an Iphone with lots more memory (and spent more money) and hoping you will buy that more expensive Iphone next time you buy one. If they choose not to fix it, then I would think that's definitely the answer.

It is melicious corporate practice. I reported it on all the beta versions but Apple wants to sell phones with higher capacity. If you have less space than you get more frustrated with less capacity phone and you want to buy newphone. And it is the most inconvenient phone for syncing and stuff in market. If it continues Apple will have to get out of smartphone segment just as some other companies faced it.

A bit misguided.

All Apple wants you to realise and use is IMAP or iCloud, which takes up less space than POP email, but still gives you headers to ALL your messages, for threading and conversations.

This is similar to iTunes Match.

The best thing they can do, and that you should suggest, is to HIDE undownloaded messages, and then you will start whining where did your messages go.

Learn a bit, and progress a mile.

Again, ditch the POP baggage.

iOS 7 mail is way better than iOS 6.

Hated having to set messages to 1,000 in order to have decent enough pre-loaded message headers when searching.

Much like the download limit message setting on a desktop, there is a built in algorithm for downloading messages in iOS 7 mail via IMAP.

As to Yumbo's point about IMAP, it's true if your ISP is where you want to keep all your email. However I want them off that server as quickly as possible and on to my Mac. The phone and iPad get the most recent mail from the ISP account, but I only need it the phones in a transitory way. Bring back the iOS6 limit so we are not constrained into a single way of operating.

I would love it if my phones could be kept in sync with my Mac, but unless I turn that into some network visible mail server which I could IMAP to, it ain't gonna happen. Syncing phone and computer emails is a different feature that Apple should develop for something other than iCloud accounts.

Yumbo,

I appreciate your comments... but you fail to understand the power of pop versus imap. I have multiple devices that I access my multiple pop accounts...one of which is an iphone. As I access them, I have my accounts configured to leave emails on server so that all the other devices can access these same emails. Ultimately, I use Outlook and pull all of the messags down to my PC so that I can perform a backup of these emails in a PST file. If I used IMAP, I could do all of these same thngs, except for one thing.. if I delete one email by mistake, I will have deleted this same email across all of the devices. Prior to iOS 7, I, like everyone else on this thread, could limit the number of emails that were pulled down from the server, the last 200, 100, 50, etc... of unread messages. This is now gone from the configuration. I now have over 16000 unread emails on my iphone plus all of the emails I have read which is probably a few thousand more. Iphone email is pathetically sad on the management of email once it hits the phone and deleting or filing is horribly poor in particular. I feel sorry for the people that use Imap and deleted all the emails on their phone, only to find that all of the emails on the server or elsewhere are also deleted. I hope that an Apple developer will read this so that he can see that they have made a seriously impactful change in iOS7 that is affecting many, many people.

That's cool.

The original issue was not controlling the download, which is a non-issue.

For your particular need to backup, would a simple backup on the desktop suffice?

Archive function?

Your message ends up in the trash anyway, which can be moved back.

I don't see the hazard.

It isn't like camera roll deletion. The safeguard for that is Photostream.

Kobimaru, I think your views about POP vs. IMAP are very misguided. What you describe as the "power of POP over IMAP" is widely considered to be the disadvantage of POP. The remedy for accidently deleted e-mails on your iPhone should be no different than it is on a desktop - you simply go to the trash and recover the email.

Additionally, the iPhone already has a very good safeguard to prevent accidental deletion of emails (regardless of whether you are using POP, IMAP or Exchange ActiveSync). Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and turn ON 'Ask before Deleting'. I think the hassle of having to re-organise your mailbox on each separate device - marking e-mails as read, moving to folders, deleting mails (the ones you actually don't want) - far outweighs the hassle of recovering the one-off accidentally deleted email.

I think people on this forum need to stop debating POP vs. IMAP. The key issue is that Apple took away a simple, basic setting that allowed the user to control the number of e-mails downloaded to the phone. I do understand the concept of downloading headers to improve on-device/offline search, but we always had the option to 'search on server' on iOS 6, albeit with some issues. More importantly, the user should get to decide whether he/she wants to sacrifice space and low unread counts for faster search or not.

I usually don't have a problem with Apple's control-freak nature because it yields a better overall experience. But it's a fine balance deciding which aspects should be controlled by Apple and which should be left to the user. In this instance, I think Apple has made a mistake. I find it hard to believe no one at Apple foresaw this as a potential issue with users who don't search for e-mails often on their phone and would prefer a low unread count.

I reckon people who don't read their email in the first place, should just delete them, or create a script to archive them.

Ridiculous otherwise.

Unsubscribe from those mailing lists!

Exchange seems to be fine. Gmail is not showing as unread but there are a lot if emails. Started to move them or archive them. I also have an xfinity comcast account which has too many. I logged onto the server to delete many but wanted save a bunch for ref. just not sure how to limit this like the gmail account. Any ideas?

I was talking with our verizon representative and mentioned that my iPad (all of a sudden) had about 4000 emails. I thought it was an update thing and she said it was related to our cable. We have Road Runner cable and I guess a lot of customers were complaining to verizon, when really it was a mail issue. I ended up deleting all of them. Today I go the new iphone 5s and low and behold, I have 4000 more emails I have to delete!!

Seems like another POP related situation.

Even if the default of 50 messages was still available, the SAME issue will persist.

I use an IMAP email and my iphone doesn't download my latest emails, I sugpect that this is due to this unlimited emails in inbox issue as it seems to create a problem as my iphone constantly tries to download all older emails from my inbox (and I have thousands on heavy emails), the end result is that it freezes and doesn't download the most recent, thus I can't download my recent emails. I hope apple fixes that as I had to change to an android phone now as reading my emails is a necessity for me.