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?

I've just spoken to a Senior Advicer at Apple customer support. She knew of the issue and said that Apple still support POP and that their engineers are working to fix the problem. She acknowledged that iOS 9.1 hasn't fixed the problem and that we have to wait.

Apple have really dropped the ball with this.

That is some good news at last! It's a great relief to hear that Apple acknowledge the problem and are working to fix it. Just for the record, I have also updated to iOS 9.1 and still have the email problem. Let's hope the fix comes soon!

In reference to the message "the message could not be displayed due to the way it has been formatted," I have seen this many times in the past, typically whenever a message is in the Trash or another folder. If you move the message back to the Inbox, you will once again be able to read it. I think that bug has existed for years.

As for the iOS 9 email issue with POP accounts, I, too have this issue and really hope this gets fixed soon. My Mail & Attachments (Settings -> General -> Storage & iCloud Usage -> Storage -> Manage Storage ->) used to take up almost 2 GB but now only 7.2 MB. I heard people rejoicing at how OS 9 gave them back several gigabytes of free space. Now we know why!

AS penance for incorrectly calling the resolution of the issue following the iOS 9.1 upgrade I have spent the evening drafting a new fault description for the apple feedback site. Feel free to copy from this post and submit as many times as you like at http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Subject:

iOS 9 issue with pop/smtp email

Description:

Following upgrade to iOS 9, the content of emails downloaded to pop/smtp email accounts are randomly lost after roughly 24 hrs. The email content is replaced by the message: This message has not been downloaded from the server. The same email accounts on an iMac running OS X Yosemite & another iOS devices still running iOS 8 do not exhibit this behaviour. The 4 iOS devices upgraded to iOS 9 (iphone 6 & 5c, iPad 3 & air2) all exhibit the same behaviour.The same behaviour has been confirmed at iOS 9.0, 9.01, 9.02 and 9.1. Unlike ios8, when mobile data is not available on the iOS9 devices image content is lost from downloaded emails.Loss of the email content is unrelated to emails presence on the email provider's server. This iOS9 bug has resulted in the loss of irreplaceable user email data.

I received the same message from the Senior Advisor tonight that they realize there is a problem and an engineer is trying to figure out how to fix it. This is good news and bad news. They acknowledge the problem but don't know when they will know how to fix it.

Two senior advisors have told me the same within the past 2-3 weeks. I have not been able to get a timescale as to when (if) it will be fixed though.

Quick update: after trying many times over the past few days to do a manual backup - iCloud backup worked for my phone last night all by itself. Here's hoping it keeps working.

We now return to the mess that is iOS 9's Mail app......

Yours is the first instance I've seen of issues with iCloud Backup. Since the iOS9 update both manual and auto iCloud Backups have run normally.

Well,

Here we are almost 3 days into IOS 9.1 and my first "message not yet downloaded from server".

For one moment I felt special in that I seemed to be the only user with no problems!

I did quite a lot of testing over the last 72 hours and until this evening all was well.

But alas no more.

Come on apple get your act together otherwise you'll not only lose everybody's critical emails but you'll lose a lot of customers to your competitors too.

It could be that Apple have a real dilemma in attempting a fix? This faulty POP implementation "freed up" gigabytes of storage which a fix will remove causing screams from users who now use this storage for other purposes.

TThen they should let the users keep the free space for storage; after all it was their mistake it not like the users purchased it.

Geoff37 wrote:

It could be that Apple have a real dilemma in attempting a fix? This faulty POP implementation "freed up" gigabytes of storage which a fix will remove causing screams from users who now use this storage for other purposes.

I speculated to the person at Apple who opened my case that this was exactly it - a botched attempt to placate the people with (and justify the continued sale of) 16 GB iPhones. But mine is a 128 GB unit....and they shouldn't be "cleaning up" for me without my express consent.

Rontu2 wrote:

Yours is the first instance I've seen of issues with iCloud Backup. Since the iOS9 update both manual and auto iCloud Backups have run normally.

There's lots of chatter out there about iOS 9 having broken iCloud backup. For example: http://forums.imore.com/ios-9/340753-after-upgrade-ios9-icloud-backup-says-0-byt es-all-apps-have-no-data.html

But that's really for another thread here....

Bernard Cawley wrote:

"I speculated to the person at Apple who opened my case that this was exactly it - a botched attempt to placate the people with (and justify the continued sale of) 16 GB iPhones."

That may or may not be the case but it's likely we'll never know for sure. What's important is Apple appears to have acknowledged the issue. I expect they will address it.

For those of you who are concerned about your POP email taking up vast amounts of memory on your phones there's really no need to be.

In all probability your POP emails are gone forever so you will all now be starting again at zero.