Not able to open attachments in email after dowloading ios 9

NO didn't work ARGHHHHH Apple still looking into it this is driving me crazy

After three days mine is working OK now (see what I did in previous posting). Please note, I'm in the UK and use Virginmedia for Internet and O2 on my iPhone so don't know if my solution will work elsewhere (eg with Verizon)..

HOoe you all get it sorted soon. Fingers crossed my solution doesnt go tits up !

I have been in weekly contact with an Apple Senior Advisor who has been very helpful, thought unable to solve the problem! He tells me that the problem has now been categorised as an "Emerging Issue," which I understand now means it is being investigated by a team of operating system engineers. Hopefully they will come up with a solution very quickly. Looking at the operating system updates that are being released it seem to me that ioS9 is full of bugs and hasn't been very well tested before release!

I've held off replying until I have given sufficient time post the 9.1 update to confirm it is clear. Here are my observations:

1. We have updated an iPhone 6, iPhone 5c iPad 3 and iPad Air 2 To 9.1. All were exhibiting identical symptoms post upgrade to iOS 9. All our email accounts are pop.

2. I have had iOS 9.1 running on my iPhone 6 since last night. All emails that I have received today are still present. There have been no cases of "this message has not been downloaded from the server" in any of the emails received post update.

3. Unsurprisingly older messages already affected have not been recovered.

4. I noticed a lag when opening emails with graphics or pictures. When I select airplane mode the email text is unaffected but the pictures are not shown, only the empty frame placeholder. It appears that data is being used to download these images (from where? More to follow).

5. Attachments such as PDFs are not affected by lack of a data service (good news) so whilst it's not pretty, pop emails are once again functional when off the grid (important for me in a rural area).

6. When I got home I downloaded today's emails to the computer, which removes them from the email provider server. All of today's emails were still accessible despite the original no longer being present in the email provider server or any of the folders. I even turned the iMac off so there could be no weird back channel to the only other version of the email.

7. When I select airplane mode the pictures in emails still disappear, when I select airplane mode off the pictures reappear with a slight data usage (difficult to attribute categorically) where is this data being cached???

In summary - based on a sample of one uk email provider (BT) and 4 iOS devices pop/smttp email is functional again on iOS 9.1. Text and attachments appear to remain on the device even when data connection is lost and the email is no longer available on the server. Something has definitely changed and it's certainly not pretty reference images and graphics. I'm also a little concerned that my email is being stored in another location. So good news with caveats - Apple still have work to do. I will be using the feedback page again to highlight my remaining concerns. A) why is it so hard to set up a pop account b) why isnt the whole email downloaded and retained until I delete it - it's my storage and my data plan, I should have control and decide how I use it!

9.1 is out I downloaded it yesterday but the mail issue still happens....

I have personally found that as long as I do not delete the email from my server or what I call my laptop then the emails will stay on my phone... If I save them on my phone but delete them from my laptop then I can no longer access it from my phone after that 😟

WHat about your "Sent" emails from your mobile phone? Sent emails are affected also with this bug....they have nothing to do with your POP server...They're supposed to reside on your mobile device in your sent folder forever, until "you" decide to delete them.

Yes sent mail and even deleted mail gets automatically deleted if I remove it from my laptop which is also a Mac so it's not as if it's an issue between a PC and an Apple product this is happening on my mac my iPad and my iPhone if I keep the message on my mac then it will stay in my other places... Which may sound like an easy fix but it doesn't necessarily what I want to do because I like to keep my email organized and in folders and I like to get it off of my laptop as my phone is what I'm carrying around with me ....

THat didn't answer my question to you, What about "sent" email that you created from your mobile device? That mail does "not" exist on your PC, except only if you "CC" yourself all the mail you send to others. Regardless if you "cc" yourself or not, those "sent" emails you created and sent using your iPhone or iPad should remain on your iPhone/iPad, because that's where they are stored (in Apple mail's "Sent" folder). This issue with "sent" email has nothing to do with deleting messages from your server PC.

I hadn't really paid attention to that because I don't go back and read my sent email but I did just pull one out that I sent on Monday and it is blank and says it has not been downloaded from my server and that is a message that I created on my phone and sent to a friend

YEp, that's what I was referring to. It has been broke this way ever since ios 9. Thanks for sharing! Apple has to fix this!

It makes me mad that Apple isn't taking this seriously...

I live by my email on my phone for work and personal and what I had to go through to rebuild what I lost was not fun and many can never be brought back BUT to have this keep on happening is not fair to us users....

Update to my post last night. I spoke too soon. This morning many of yesterday's messages are now unavailable with the now familiar message. Apologies for getting people's hopes up - a good lesson for me in waiting before posting. It took over 24 hours for the issue to re-manifest itself. i had cleared my inbox following the upgrade and therefore I can categorically say that these are emails that were received post upgrade. All of the other posters are correct, the issue remains at 9.1. Sorry for posting duff information!

UUnfortunately what I have found is no matter what solution I try (and I've tried everything) including resetting my phone, deleting email account on all devices, reinstalling, changing settings, etc....everything appears to work for about 12-36 hours and then back to the same thing....so it's definitely an Apple bug (whether or not it's on purpose) but it appears that it's up to them to fix it and nothing we can do on our end 😟

I personally believe (IMHO) that this problem will never be "fixed" by Apple to our satisfaction. This is my opinion:

Apple cleans up emails, attachments and large ones, to save memory in order to fit the 16 GB devices. "They" believe that if you want to retain old email, do not delete it from the server. Most email servers has significantly higher capacity these days. They provide the summary for the email, and if you want to read/obtain the attachments, it can re-download it from the servers. The clean up is perform periodically on some schedule. I see the exact same situation with IMAP, except if you delete the email on any device, it will delete it all the devices.

The problem is, due to the way POP works, we were able to retain "deleted" email from the servers and it has some advantages that we have taken advantage of. I've tried other email apps and deleted it because the email database used way too much memory because it kept everything and it was a major task to delete the email to not use up the memory. (I was using it for my security cameras, and it sends a email with the photo attached when it detects motion. To clean up, it was easier to delete the account and add it back in.)

Even though the behavior has changed and there is some logic to it, (retaining all attachments locally can really chew up the memory on the device with no way to delete attachments,) such a change knowingly or not, without notification is not good. Also, the behavior of the Mail app and error message is a bug. It should notify the reason why it can not download the email / attachments - "The attachment / email is no longer on the server" / "The email has been deleted from the Server", etc. Another disadvantage of cleaning up email, is loss of referring to old email when internet is not available and there is no way on the iOS to save important email to let say a PDF. It needs a send to option to save the attachment also.

Every approach has advantages and disadvantages, but changes without notification is not good, especially for historical email.

Apple probably did not realize the impact of the change of behavior, and once the Email was deleted and no longer available on the server, there is nothing they can do. Whether the "fix" the problem going forward by fixing the error message and adding an option for the user to retain old email at the expense of storage or not for those that don't care.