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?

You're not following my procedure to the word there are you Mr. Finch?

Dear All,

In general the update fixed the biggest problems that I had. That said, I had an email with a only a link in the body sent to me on 12/24 that I had trashed. When going through my trash to make final deletions that email had the dreaded message that it had not been downloaded. I sent my advisor a screen save of this which she forwarded on to an engineer. It is possible that if you never look at things in your trash at a later date you would not know that this "could" happen. All of the rest of the trash looked fine. So there is still something not right, however, everything in my inbox and sent file seem to be okay. No one knows if they will fix this but it leaves me with less confidence in Apple than I formerly had. Why buy Applecare.....

Yes, I am.

hi vwgolfman,

as you say 9.2 brought along several other issues, it seems different users get different issues. Mine is that Trash ressurects all emails handled by the device.

I tried your test a couple of times on different POP accounts and can't replicate your error. However, just because I can't replicate it, means nothing.

Hi Lawrence, I have just followed your instructions....

I have 3 POP accounts and an IMAP account configured on my iPhone 6S+.

I do not currently have any emails sitting in the INBOX of one of the POP accounts so I deleted the account, rebooted, re-configured (added) it and then re-booted.

I have re-tested.

These are my exact instructions so if anything at all varies from your device we are not testing under the same configuration....

Click to open mail app.

Click new mail icon in bottom right-hand corner.

Cursor is flashing in "To" field. In this field enter the email address of the account which you have just configured above.

Click in the "Subject" field and enter "Test".

Click in the main email body and enter "This is a test email".

Click Send.

(I don't believe it matters which email address the email is sent from).

I now see my "mailboxes" screen. I have it configured so it shows from top to bottom.....

All inboxes, All drafts, All sent, All trash.

In the same screen and below the 4 rows described above I see the 4 email accounts listed under "accounts".

Click All sent

Top row shows the email I just sent. Swipe left to send it to trash bin.

Click Mailboxes in top left-hand corner to take you back to previous screen.

Click All trash

Swipe left on the email you have just sent to the trash.

We have just done that so there is no longer any record of the email we just sent which could confuse matters.

Click Mailboxes in top left-hand corner to take you back to previous screen.

Click All inboxes. This forces the app to download any emails waiting to be delivered (my accounts are configured to manually fetch)

The email arrives and I can see it at the top of my All inboxes screen which I am now on.

The subject is correct ("Test") and the body is correct ("This is a test email") (I have it configured to preview 3 lines).

Swipe left on that email to send it to the trash bin.

Click Mailboxes in top left-hand corner to take you back to previous screen.

Click All trash.

Now in the All trash screen I can see the email at the top.

The subject is correct but the body now reads "This message has no content" ISSUE/BUG! (I have it configured to preview 3 lines).

Click on the email.

The email body now reads "This message has not been downloaded from the server" ISSUE/BUG!

Click the folder at the bottom to move the email.

Click Sent.

Click All trash

Click Mailboxes.

Click All sent.

Now before I deleted and re-configured the account as per your instructions, the email I just moved from the trash box to the sent box completely disappears off of the device at this stage (is not in the sent box and not in the trash box).

But now having deleted and re-configured the account the email is now sitting in the sent box but still reads "This message has not been downloaded from the server" when clicked.

See how you get on.

I attempted to follow the instructions, but I don't think I'm seeing the same as you...

I don't see... All inboxes, All drafts, All sent, All trash.

I just see All Inboxes and the list of 6 accounts I have configured.

?? This looks the same on several devices incl' devices not on IOS9.

Weird?!

I don't see... All inboxes, All drafts, All sent, All trash

If you select the "Edit" option in the top right-hand corner of the Mailboxes screen you can choose the way you want this screen to appear.

I've chosen to display All Inboxes, All Sent, All Draft, All Trash.

You can also choose the order in which the rows appear in the Mailboxes screen.

vwgolfman wrote:

"apple have obviously addressed some of the issues but they have not cured them completely. In fact they appear to have created others in the process."

I followed your steps and was able to duplicate the issue, however it is not a consistent event.

Test 1 - left dragged message to the Trash then opened it in Trash and saw "this message has no content". When I tried moving it to the Sent folder the message did not disappear however I got a dialogue stating the message could not be moved to the Sent folder.

Test 2 - repeated the test but instead of left dragging to move to Trash I tapped Edit and moved the message to Trash. Viewing in the message list showed the text of the message but opening the message in Trash showed the "not downloaded" message. This time however I was able to move the message to the Sent folder. However, I tried but was unable to move the message from the Sent folder to the Inbox. I tried 3 times and the message remained in the Sent folder.

Test 3 - I repeated these steps with the message I received from Apple Support Communities that contained your post stating:

Rontu2.....

I see what you mean about your Test 2.

I also cannot move the message to the inbox from the sent box after first moving it from the trash bin to the sent box.

I know this will seldom be desired but still it should work properly.

IT IS POSSIBLE to move an email from the sent box to the inbox if it is appearing in the sent box as an email just sent.

With regards to unread emails being deposited straight into the trash bin, one should be able to read messages in the trash bin properly before deleting them once and for all, not be greeted with "this message has not been downloaded from the server".

doing some general housekeeping and I changed passwords on a couple of the configured accounts.

I then accessed the accounts on MBP / Web server / 8.4 device and sent several test mails to ensure the accounts were still functioning correctly.

I then sent more test mails from 9.2 device….. chaos!

Issue 1

- delete mails from SENT folder

- go to TRASH folder and witness the deleted mails (sometimes the mails are not there!)

- delete mails from TRASH folder

- go to SENT folder and deleted mails are back

Issue 2

SETTINGS> MAIL> ACCOUNTS.. shows duplicates / triplicates of some accounts… some of which it allows me to delete the duplicate, others not. After deleting all duplicates the device would allow > Exit mail app settings and go back to mail app settings - all accounts are gone.

Finally, after a couple of times deleting all accounts - rebooting device - adding accounts - I’m back to where i was with the Trash folder on all POP accounts resurrecting all emails handled on device since last rebuild.

Mail app in IOS9 is ****. What’s more could something be going on with the overall memory useage on the device?

Another day wasted, ****ing around with Apple.

Thanks for your input. No, I haven't tried restoring the devices as new, nor have I called support to try to troubleshoot the problem. I have a life and don't have time to keep messing around with this. I only see the problem on my iPad and, luckily, checking my mail there is mainly just a convenience and not a necessity.

Restore your iphone from itunes resolved the problem !! check it out

tried it...more than several times.

Don't see how restoring your account from iTunes would help to cure an issue that lies in the IOS s/w, unless the IOS had been amended!

You either dropped lucky, restored an older version than IOS9, or just haven't witnessed the problem yet!

Same problem continues after 206,000 reviews, incredibly bad Apple! Do we not need to be able to open attachments? Please fix this or let us know that you cannot and we can move on. Thank you.

Sorry to be so late to this party. I have been watching this and other threads regarding mail in ios9.x I have not posted before as I had little to input that would help as I am quite new to iPhone's. I found that 9.2 fixed most problems I was experiencing, however I am still seeing that that "Trash resurrects all emails handled by the device". I hope this gets fixed in 9.3