This has been happening for the past week or so. I had 23 unread messages in my iCloud account. I opened Mail on my iMac, and the messages were gone. I then went to my iPhone, and the messages were there, but disappeared due to the syncing. I went to the iCloud website and could not find them anywhere. This is a serious problem, as I am losing messages and they are not in any of the trashes!
iPhone 5s, iOS 7.0.4
Is this an iCloud account or something else?
I have an iCloud account, have had it since the old .mac days. It has always worked fine until a week or so ago.
Check in the Archive folder to see if they are missing or if they were just moved from the Inbox.
Do you have Time Machine backup? If yes, you can recover but in the mean time, you might want to forward your messages to another account as backup. You can setup a Gmail or Outlook.com account if you don't have a second account.
Forward all messages automatically
1. In iCloud Mail, choose Preferences from the Action pop-up menu in the sidebar.
2. In the General pane, select “Forward my email to,” then type the forwarding address in the text field.
3. If you don’t want to store a copy of each forwarded message in iCloud, select “Delete messages after forwarding.” Keep in mind that storing copies of forwarded messages decreases your available iCloud storage space.
4. Click Done.
I do have time machine, and will try recovering them. I also began forwarding them last week, then things seemed to being working OK, and stopped, but have since forwarded them again.
Nothing is in the archive folder or the trash.
I'd love to figure out what is causing this to happen and fix it.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Make sure when forwarding you don't select to delete. You just want to backup until we can figure out what is happening.
If it were a mix of POP and IMAP it's not unusual to see missing messages but for IMAP we generally don't see unexplained missing messages.
Check rules and schedules to be sure nothing is set to delete.
BTW, rather than Restore from Time Machine copy the Mail folder to the Desktop. You can select to import specific folders.
Maybe this is another clue. I went onto icloud.com to set to forward the email to a gmail account. I'm getting some stuff forwarded but not others. Everything so far that I have received has been with the old .mac address (as opposed to .me or .icloud).
Test.
Send yourself 3 emails, from your Gmail account, one to .mac and one each to .me and .icloud versions of your address, make them distinguishable from one another. Tell us if all 3 come through?
I did one to .mac, one to .me, and one to .icloud. All three were both forwarded to the gmail account and appeared in my icloud mail box.
So all 3 addresses worked.
Thanks
Yesterday, however, some things were just forwarded and didn't show up in the icloud mailbox. I'll keep an eye on what happens here. Three emails forwarded, two addressed to the .mac and one to .me, were in the gmail spam folder, but never showed up in icloud. When I looked in the icloud "junk" folder, nothing was in it. This is all very strange and inconsistent.
ShariPotter wrote:
Three emails forwarded, two addressed to the .mac and one to .me, were in the gmail spam folder, but never showed up in icloud. When I looked in the icloud "junk" folder, nothing was in it. This is all very strange and inconsistent.
They won't be on iCloud if Gmail junked them before they got there.
I would turn off forwarding and see if that clears the issue.
I actually did that a few days ago. I had forwarding on for a few days, things seemed back to normal. Then I turned off forwarding, and a couple of days later, the unread emails disappeared. I am noticing that not everything is being forwarded. Also, when I read something on the icloud account, it then becomes "read" on the google account. It is all very strange. I'm hesitant to turn it off and lose stuff again.
Thank you, dianeoforegon and Csound1 for trying to help me figure this out!
Check out this article: Silent email filtering makes iCloud an unreliable option | Macworld
It's not just iCloud but Gmail and other free services "filter" our email.
Well, it has been about a month since this problem began, and I am having my iCloud mail forwarded to a gmail account. The iCloud mail, if it goes to my iCloud mailbox, just evaporates within minutes of arriving. I'm still not sure why. Unless someone has any great ideas, I'm just going to have to dump iCloud entirely.
Why is my unread iCloud mail suddenly disappearing?
