IOS7 iPhone emails disappearing, are not delivered

Yup it's sad

Apple does not monitor these support forums

As I was told. So anything posted on

Here isn't being viewed by any apple employees

You will never see Apple reply here. This is a community forum. You can use the http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html form for iOS feedback and use the built-in Mail feedback (Mail > Provide Mail Feedback...) for MacOS Mail.

Posts that just say "it's not working" are not particularly helpful. You need to indicate the specific services (gmail, icloud, yahoo, corporate exchange server) and method (IMAP, POP) that you are using.

There are many ways that mail can be configured incorrectly and there are lots of suggestions about how to correct these.

If you have apple support I suggest you contact them -- they were very helpful in resolving my mail configuration settings (for both MacOS Mail.app as well as on my iOS devices).

Message was edited by: Eric Tiffany

I agree with the above comment, however in this case there is no misconfiguration that could cause these symptoms. And emails have no guarantee of delivery, I get that. This issue goes way beyond configuration settings. We are talking about incoming emails working fine, and outgoing emails appearing to the user to be working fine (no error, no bounce back, not stuck in the outbox, the device even makes the swoosh sound indicating it has left the outbox.) Then you find out later, perhaps days later that nobody is receiving your emails. Restarting the device fixes it, temporarily at least, for me. One interesting fact is that for me when the problem occurred, it occurred on both my iPhone and iPad at the same time. This has happened to me twice over several months, so it's not easy to reproduce but can be devastating when it happens.

Well the issue started happening to me again, and i think this time I have found a way to reproduce the problem on demand. I have several email accounts configured on my iPad: two gmail accounts and a hotmail account. I rarely use the hotmail account so much of the time I leave it disabled. What I have found is that when I disable the hotmail account, which I do often, the outbound email of all my accounts stop working until I restart the mail app. I'm still testing to see if this holds true all the time.

You figured it out! I've been pulling my hair out over this. I too had recently disabled an email account and wasn't able to send email (although that wasn't apparent until I noticed that my reply wasn't included in a gmail thread). I restarted the email app and mail is now sending reliably. Whew! Thanks!

This fix also just worked for me! I turn my work email off and on occasionally and hadn't closed the mail app since the last time I did it. (I did, however, spend a good chunk of time going through this discussion, deleting and re-adding my email accounts, etc.). I just closed the mail app and when I reopened it and sent a test - it sent, was received, and showed up in my Sent folder. Nice work.

Hopefully someone at Apple does in fact monitor this (even if they aren't chiming in) and a fix shows up in the next update.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION!

I have had this problem too since I upgraded to an iPhone 5 (my mail goes through Telus). Tried all the suggestions in this thread, nothing worked, although after switching my iPhone off completely, then back on again, the mail 'disappearing' was resolved and the mail not sent was placed in my 'Outbox', so at least I knew what hadn't been sent.

Well, I have access to my husbands and my sons mail accounts from my iPhone too, so I thought I would send mail using both of their accounts just to see if the same thing happened. My husbands e-mail to me at my work e-mail address failed and was placed in the 'Outbox', but my sons worked and I received it to my work e-mail address. So my thoughts then were "Well, what is different on the settings on my sons mail account that means it will send e-mail without a problem?". The only difference was that all the 'Other SMTP Servers' were set to 'Off' and the the Outgoing Mail Server - Server Port was set to 1025, whereas mine and my husbands was set to 587. I changed them both to 1025 and for now, fingers cross, touch wood, rub my lucky rabbit tail, it works. Mail is sending and being received without a problem. Yay! not sure if these Server Port numbers are unique to Telus or not, but it may be worth trying..... If it fails again, I will report back here

SMTP's port is 25, or 465 for SMTPS. Unless the email provider specifically changes it to some other port, those are the only ports that work. Maybe Telus has it as 1025?

Telus actually lists it as 587, but my my son's e-mail a/c (set-up in the last 3 weeks) and my iPad (brand new today) both automatically set it up as 1025.... I don't care what the number is, as long as it works!!!! 🙂

I've been having this issue as well, like others, WITHOUT my knowledge until I noticed people missing appointments with me that I had organised. I am a university lecturer and my iPad is crucial to my role, I use it for a lot of emailing - or did.

I have tried all the things suggested here and the fix (which is hardly a fix) so far seems to come from quitting the mail app, and starting it again. However, I'm never sure if mails have sent or not and I now can't trust my iPad to do a basic function. I've no idea who I have replied to since upgrading to iOS7 months ago and I'm worried I'm looking very unprofessional. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but not in this situation!

Just to confirm, I now have upgraded and have the 5s which I installed as a new phone, no restore. After 4 days I now have this problem on the new phone

Only way to temp get round the issue is to save the email to drafts and then go into drafts and send from there. You will then find instead of not sensing it shoes in the outbox and you can keep sending until it leaves.

This fix worked for me too--turn email app off and then turn back on.

My problem was intermittent--most of my emails would send. However if I wrote a draft, then deleted it, then tried to write another one on the same thread, those are the ones that didn't send correctly--or so it seemed..

I still believe this is NOT an IOS 6/7 issue, as it appears to happen on both OS (I have 6). I believe the issue is that sometimes, when the phone does not have a good (or any) connection to the cellular carried/internet, instead of just parking the sent email in Outbox, as it normally does, it just vaporizes the email after you press send. The problem is that you dont know ahead of pressing send whether it will save the email into Outbox, or vaporize it. It's a very serious issue as has been discussed here. Is apple aware? Hard to say.

Can anyone try to isolate the problem to poor connectivity? is it possible that in some rare cases the iOS 'thinks' that it's connected to the internet (poor coverage, expired hot-spot session, wifi with inconsistent internet connection, etc.) so instead of saving the message to the Outbox folder for later delivery, it starts to send it to the outgoing server (which receives partial or no data at all), clears it from the drafts folder (if it was already saved there) and that's it. The sent message is never saved to the sent folder on the device by design so it looks to me like it's a very low level system communication bug in the iOS where sent mesages are not correctly verified to be delivered.

What's more interesting to me is that it happens on multiple protocols, such as SMTP, IMAP and ActiveSync, where the end result is the same.

Thoughts?

Avi