After ios9 update my emails with attachments won't open and say "message not yet downloaded from server". They were there previously. How do I get them back?

O4aTimtam,

good work on following up in the Apple Store.

Never give up, never surrender!

to cheer everyone on the thread up with some dark humour...ooh the irony of it!!!

Lawrence Finch wrote:

John7337 wrote:

So much for pre-release software testing!

It was tested by roughly 1 million users for 4 months. Plus an unknown number who installed the beta versions without being part of the testing program. So either none of those million used POP email, which is unlikely, or it is an isolated problem affecting only a few users. That's actually pretty likely based on how few different users have reported it (I've only been able to find under 100 unique usernames (~50 in this thread) reporting the problem out of roughly 200 million users who have upgraded so far).

I Don't think this constitutes sound analysis or evidence based input. The assumptions you use to make your calculations are flawed. I do not think this helps the users with this issue who are contributing to this thead. The essence of what you are saying can be summed up as: I'm very experienced, I don't have the issue you less experienced users seem to be whinging about, have you tried some really obvious stuff like turning your phone off and on (cue patronising description of how to do this), how could a million genius beta testers like me be wrong (oh hang let's think of other times that major flaws have slipped through the net). Highlighting the issue to the hosts might be a useful start?

.

peter144a wrote:

In all fairness, this thread is very hard to find and difficult to post unless one is experienced in dealing with product issues. I suspect that most do not even know these support communities exist. Further, we don't know what feedback apple received from the testers, how it responded, or how many reports were made the general ios9 release.

It is trivially easy to find. Just google it: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=message+not+yet+downloaded+from+server

That's how most people find the Apple Support Communities.

Rontu2 - I hope that is not the case!! Following an online chat last week I have just received this email from Paul Taylor, IOS Sr Tech Advisor, Worldwide Apple Care -

'Thank you for following up with me on this. I will submit the case we worked on to our engineering department for further investigation. We hope to have a resolution offered via a software update. '

Sorry, but overall, very few people find their way to these forums. I'm guessing there are literally millions of iPhone users who, to take an example from many years ago, still have a VCR that is flashing 12:00. Many of the iPhone features are well above their capabilities or even their interest which is why, when they have a problem, they go to the Apple store or to their children or grandchildren.

Since no solution has been proposed here, our job is to get Apple to focus on the issue. I think that major publicity is the best way to get them off dead center.

.

Hi Will616. Thanks very much for your support 🙂 . I was feeling a bit flat after my Genuis appointment.

But I'm here again, hoping to see a post saying Apple have released a fix!! Despite best endeavours here, I just don't think there is a setting or scenario left untried yet. Apple must release the fix ... and soon 😎 . Keeping sending the feedback to Apple using the mentioned link.

PS thanks for posting the pic to cheer us up, sadly I cant see it, but from your comments I reckon it was cuttingly good!

peter144a wrote:

Sorry, but overall, very few people find their way to these forums. I'm guessing there are literally millions of iPhone users who, to take an example from many years ago, still have a VCR that is flashing 12:00. Many of the iPhone features are well above their capabilities or even their interest which is why, when they have a problem, they go to the Apple store or to their children or grandchildren.

Since no solution has been proposed here, our job is to get Apple to focus on the issue. I think that major publicity is the best way to get them off dead center.

Very many people find their way here. The actual number is private to Apple, but it is many millions (that's one of the reasons that the forum is as glitchy as it is; this is the world's largest deployment of the underlying forum engine). And when there is a serious problem those number make themselves known. Here's an example from 2 1/2 years ago, for a real problem that affected roughly 1% of users:

That's 2 1/2 million views, and almost 13,000 posts. Back when there were less than 100 million iPhones. Today there are 7 times that number. When a problem affects even a small minority of users they find their way here. (that problem was solved, but it took several weeks.) There are much longer threads than the one we have here regarding other iOS 9 issues.

I'm not saying there isn't a real issue that needs fixing, but the number of users affected is small. So rather than ranting it would be much more effective to do some troubleshooting and see if we can narrow down the conditions under which this occurs. It isn't memory, because there is no limit to the storage that one app can access other than the total free memory on the device. If we have some useful information to help Apple isolate the problem that will help speed a resolution. I've been experimenting today with sending and receiving messages with large attachments (8 MB on average, which is near the limit of most ISPs for a single email). If we can find a way to reproduce the problem I (and any users at level 6 and above) have a way to pass information on to engineering. But pointing them to a message thread that is 90% rants is not going to get their attention.

Count me as having this problem on both my iPhone 6s and iPad Air 2. All of my ISPs are POP only. I have the problem for both saved and sent emails.

I have left feedback at http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

I have been following this thread over the last few days in hopes that somebody came up with a solution or posts that Apple has a solution. I am also having this problem as is many other people I know. This is definitely a problem with the ios9 update and anybody suggesting otherwise is just trying to stir the pot. I noticed the problem immediately. I have a pop3 account for my home email. I also have a gmail account for work. I immediately setup in settings of my gmail account to have my pop3 emails forwarded to my gmail account in case I lose them. Once I did that the issue with my pop3 emails stopped altogether. I thought it was fixed so I canceled it from going to my gmail account. Well once I did that the problem began again. So I decided to create a separate gmail account just for this problem. In settings I have set up my pop3 emails to be copied or forwarded to that gmail account. I never even look at that gmail account but now my pop3 emails do not disappear. I'm not saying this is a fix or the best solution but it has been working for me in the meantime.

Greetings,

Okay - so far - so good. Here is what worked for me:

• Restored iPhone to September.
• iPhone 6S requested password for email.
• Emails flowed in.
• Settings - General - Storage & iCloud Usage - USED was 8.8 GB and AVAILABLE was 2.5 GB.
• Deleted old iMessages, some Photos, a few videos, a few apps, etc.
• Now - USED 7.7 GB and AVAILABLE 3.7 GB
• Keeping emails on Verizon server...did not delete them.
• Email on iPhone now contains ~ 60 messages - and all of their content for over 24 hours.

Greetings,

Okay - so far - so good. Here is what worked for me:

• Restored iPhone to September.
• iPhone 6S requested password for email.
• Emails flowed in.
• Settings - General - Storage & iCloud Usage - USED was 8.8 GB and AVAILABLE was 2.5 GB.
• Deleted old iMessages, some Photos, a few videos, a few apps, etc.
• Now - USED 7.7 GB and AVAILABLE 3.7 GB
• Keeping emails on Verizon server...did not delete them.
• Email on iPhone now contains ~ 60 messages - and all of their content for over 24 hours.

As I understand it, having to leave your emails on the (Verizon) server defeats the purpose of using pop that is supposed to transfer those emails permanently to your iPhone. If you are going to leave them on the server so that the content can be accessed instead of being deleted on a random basis, I'm guessing that you might as well use imap.

Hi Lawrence

I, like many others, have also had the problem of the contents of emails disappearing (specifically only those with attachments) since the moment I upgraded to iOS9. I have been following this thread since day one and share the frustration that countless others are obviously feeling, be they in the hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands. I have POP accounts on my PC and iPhone5. Changing to IMAP is not an option. Until Apple resolves this issue (it's starting to seem more like 'if' than 'when'), I have changed the setting on my PC to leave a copy of all incoming messages on the server, so as to preserve the messages on my iPhone. My iPhone has always been set to never delete from server.

I notice that you've mentioned a couple of times that you have been experimenting by sending and receiving emails with large attachments to yourself, to see if that's what may be causing the "message not yet downloaded from server" message to appear. I have been experimenting too, and can vouch for the fact that the size of the attachment is not a determining factor -- I have sent emails to myself with very small attachments (a Word file or a small pdf document) and, once manually removed from the server, they suffer the same fate as emails with large attachments. Someone also suggested a while ago that "flagging" the incoming emails might be a workaround -- I can vouch that this also does not work.

And so we wait .......