iOS9 continuing email problems

Question

Level 1

12 points

iOS9 continuing email problems

I upgraded to iOS9 on my iPhone 4S and have been having problems with email every since. I bought my 4S the month they came out, 4 years ago. I noticed the first day with iOS9 I had old emails in my POP email account. I get 30-40 emails a day and I always deal with them and delete them within a day or two. These same emails get downloaded to my Mac Pro and deleted off the server on a daily basis. On my iPhone with iOS9, looking at my POP account, I noticed a boat-load of old emails which had been previously deleted. I know these emails aren't on the server, so they weren't downloaded after the upgrade. They don't exist anywhere except my iPhone. I scrolled back through the emails until I got to May, 2015, and the scroll bar was maybe 1/10th of the way down the screen. Is that indicating that every email that's ever existed on this iPhone since I bought it in October, 4 years ago is still on this iPhone???

Ok, so there's a boat-load of emails, and now I see there's a Trash All option when I hit Edit. The Trash All button didn't do anything. While it looked like my emails were gone, I'd put the iPhone down for 5 minutes and they'd all be right back. I deleted my POP account and recreated it. All of the trashed emails came right back. I read that for some reason another email account could be the culprit, so I deleted all 4 of my email accounts, 1 POP and 3 IMAPs. I then recreated them using the settings used for those same accounts on my iPad which is not running iOS9. Gosh, golly, gee, all the damned old email came right back into my POP account! So, I started deleting them 100 at a time. I'd tap Edit, then select 100 emails, and then tap Delete. The little "busy" indicator next to my wi-fi signal would rotate for 6 minutes. I'd select the next 100 and repeat the process. The next morning, I noticed a message on my iPhone telling me that it couldn't delete the emails, and they were all back.

I'm now at a point where I delete 4 at a time and they successfully go into the trash and I am able to delete them from the trash. This process takes about 2 seconds. But, overall, how fricking long is that process going to take to delete them all? There are thousands of emails in there to be deleted!

BTW, I've also noticed that I'm not able to delete emails out of one of my IMAP accounts. When I try, the email disappears, and then after a couple minutes I get an error saying that the email couldn't be deleted. I have to go to my old iPad to delete those.

Needless to say, I'm not happy. I've been having problems with Yosemite since I downloaded and installed it last fall, and now iOS is a huge problem. I'm beginning to wonder if Microsoft is writing these OSs because they are clearly not up to the former Apple standard.

Any suggestions? And, pleased don't tell me to reset my iPhone. I don't want to go through setting up all of those apps again.

iPhone 4S, iOS 9

Posted on Sep 24, 2015 6:28 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

RodInEC Author

Level 1

12 points

Sep 25, 2015 1:49 PM in response to RodInEC

I just updated to iOS 9.0.1. The problem persists. I tried Trash All again and all of the emails disappeared. I looked in the Trash, and they were there. I hit Edit and then Delete All and they all disappeared. I turned my iPhone off and let it sit for a while before turning it back on. Boom, all the older emails are back in my in-box.

Reply

Answer 2

RodInEC Author

Level 1

12 points

Sep 27, 2015 3:26 PM in response to RodInEC

So, my iPhone's been sitting here for over 2 days with the busy indicator spinning the entire time. I know it has my email account on the server locked up because I can't download email on any other device. A few hours ago it did stop spinning and I could see email in my in-box. After several minutes of scrolling through it, I did indeed see the very first email this iPhone ever received, which was back on 11/01/2011. 4 fricking years ago! So, again, I tapped Edit and Trash All, and as you would expect, it's spinning again. Another interesting thing though is that the in-box shows the message "No Mail" while at the bottom of the screen, it shows "30 Unread." ((😠))

Reply

Answer 3

Wo21222

Level 1

10 points

Sep 29, 2015 7:24 AM in response to RodInEC

Somewhat the same problem. I have the 5S. I notice that if you delete while the spinner guy is going, the problem always occurs. If you wait for spinner guy to stop, then it's usually ok. However, sometimes if I delete from account A, wait for spinner guy to finish, and then delete from account B too soon after, it happens again. That's as far as I am on this

Reply

Answer 4

RodInEC Author

Level 1

12 points

Sep 29, 2015 8:15 PM in response to Wo21222

Thanks for the information. I'm now not sure how much email is left in my in-box. New emails arrive and are displayed on the lock screen, but when I go to the in-box, the number of unread emails increases, but nothing shows in the in-box. My battery is still running hot, and the battery, which would last me all day prior to iOS9, now runs from 100% to 0% in a matter of 4-5 hours. I'm running through 2 full charges per day, and all of this with nothing running in the background other than my solitaire game. This is very frustrating! Clearly Apple didn't test their existing apps very well. How do we bring back Steve Jobs???

Reply

Answer 5

Wo21222

Level 1

10 points

Sep 29, 2015 9:14 PM in response to RodInEC

Yep. The battery is running (and running hot) because spinner guy just keeps working, trying to accomplish some unknown task. I think it has to do with trying to sync with the isp server as to whether these emails should be deleted, but that's a guess.

Again, you should not delete emails while spinner guy is working. The question is how do you get spinner guy to stop.

I think I've discovered a temporary solution. Try this out. put the phone in airplane mode for at least 3-5 minutes. Then off airplane mode. spinner guy should spin for a few seconds, then stop. It's only a temporary solution, but will allow you to delete your emails off your iphone.

Do you automatically delete emails from your isp server after a certain amount of time?

Reply

Answer 6

RodInEC Author

Level 1

12 points

Sep 30, 2015 4:01 AM in response to Wo21222

I download emails to my MacBook Pro and delete them off the server on a daily basis. Unless I'm traveling, there's never more than 50 emails in my in-box on the server. Further, when I delete them off the server, I know they're really deleted because my iPhone doesn't download them. The thousands of emails on my phone exist nowhere else but the phone, and as I said, I "delete" them off the phone on a daily basis and empty the trash regularly.

Reply

Answer 7

Wo21222

Level 1

10 points

Sep 30, 2015 6:55 AM in response to RodInEC

Whoa. Way beyond my pay grade. So you really have two problems. One, that all those emails are lurking in your phone and two, that they come out at night (or when spinner guy gets going) to haunt you. I think Apple Support can help you with the first, but apparently not the second.

Reply

Answer 8

Wo21222

Level 1

10 points

Sep 30, 2015 6:03 PM in response to Wo21222

My problem. Often when I delete emails I get spinner guy which doesn't stop and drains my battery and makes the phone too hot to keep in my pocket. To stop spinner guy I either have to turn off, then on, the phone. or put it on airplane most for at least 3 minutes. Here's how I "solved" the problem while waiting for Apple to fix it (yes, I downloaded 9.0.2 and it doesn't help). on the list of mailboxes (I have 2 email accounts) I unchecked everything except "Unread". When email comes in, I mark it as "read" and that's that. I don't delete anything -- I don't see the undeleted emails. It'll start to pile up and use a lot of space, but I'm absolutely convinced that those wonderful caring people at Apple will have solved the problem by then.

Reply

Answer 9

RodInEC Author

Level 1

12 points

Oct 1, 2015 4:23 AM in response to Wo21222

Thanks for your help and suggestions. This has been going on for a week now and I'm quite ticked.

Reply

Answer 10

Wo21222

Level 1

10 points

Oct 2, 2015 1:42 PM in response to RodInEC

Ok. If you think you were ticked before . . . . I kept trying stuff and then called apple support again. we went thru all the stuff I'd already tried, including deleting my email accounts. I reinstalled one of the accounts and it worked fine. So I thought it might be that I had two accounts that interfered with each other (both were earthlink accounts). So I activated my google account (8000 emails), and "trashed all" the google emails and they disappeared just fine. so did my first earthlink account. then I activated my second earthlink account and tried to trash and it said it couldn't find the trash, so I deleted just one and that created a trash file, and now "trash all" works fine on both accounts. I have absolutely no idea what might be different but I'm not going to complain. Maybe there's something in here for you, but I have no idea what it might be.

Reply

Answer 11

RodInEC Author

Level 1

12 points

Oct 9, 2015 1:09 PM in response to Wo21222

Thanks for the info. I just updated to 9.02. I'll try deleting and recreating accounts to see if that works.

Reply

Answer 12

Wo21222

Level 1

10 points

Oct 9, 2015 1:22 PM in response to RodInEC

ok. so "trash all" stopped working again. I called apple support, they couldn't help, made an appointment for me at the apple store and the store's only suggestion was that it was an outlook problem and to wipe the entire phone and set it up as a new phone and if that didn't work I'd have to buy a new phone. I thought "all that to get 'trash all" to work -- no way. Worst apple store experience in my whole life. I'm pretty old so I remember back in the day when software vendors would respond "our product is perfect, it must be someone else, trying reinstalling windows." didn't work then and didn't work now. My contract is up next month so I think I'll be trying Galaxy 5. I really hate to give up Apple, but Galaxy/Android is getting some mighty good reviews.

Reply

Answer 13

Oct 12, 2015 12:38 PM in response to RodInEC

IM having the same problem except it's downloaded every single email since March 2014 so I have over a years worth of emails on my iPad I select delete all it looks like there gone but when I close the app and re open it they're all there again. Has anyone found a solution yet? The software is up to date it's strange how it's only my iPad and not my phone!

Reply

Answer 14

Wo21222

Level 1

10 points

Oct 12, 2015 12:42 PM in response to bluebee2007

Yes, that's another fine feature of "trash all." IOS 9 put it on my phone, iPhone 5S, so it may be that it's device specific. I don't know. I just stopped using "trash all." Great feature, too bad it doesn't work for a lot of people. 9.0.2 doesn't fix the problem. Maybe someday.

Reply

Answer 15

RodInEC Author

Level 1

12 points

Oct 12, 2015 9:16 PM in response to Wo21222

So, again, I'm running on an iPhone 4S. I upgraded to iOS 9.02 last Friday. I still had email dating back to 2011. I deleted my various email accounts and turned my iPhone off and left it off for perhaps an hour. I then "rebooted" it and recreated my IMAP email accounts. I then recreated my POP account, the one I was having the major problems with. That was on Friday. The old emails did not, and still have not shown up in my POP account. Trash All seems to be working as expected at this time. Wo21222, I know you said that Trash All stopped working after a few days, but I haven't gotten to that point yet. So at this point, my POP account is working as expected.

However, my IMAP accounts still aren't working correctly. In those accounts, I cannot delete or move any email from the in-box to anywhere else. Grrrr!

Reply