iPhone mail suddenly downloaded thousands of old mail!

I agree with you - the phone never was holding them. What I am saying is suddenly the phone is downloading all these off the servers (different servers different ISPs or private domain hosts), it is acting as it would if you added a new mail account to a phone and it pulls in all the "unread" emails it thinks you haven't seen on the phone before.

I have already logged into the servers on these accounts, but as I said above, these have tens of thousands of historic emails. So on just one account it has taken me about 5 hours to move about 1/5 the emails I need to keep into a separate file and start deleting - that one account will take all night to clean up.

Here's what I'm doing now - I'm going to each server and creating a folder called "saved mail from iPhone fiasco" and moving ALL the mail from the inbox into it. Then the inbox should be empty and have no more things for the iPhone to download.

I'll let you guys know if THAT works! LOL!

Thanks for trying to help, but the reason I never make these IMAP is precisely because I don't want to delete something on the phone and have it do that everywhere 9including the server). The majority of these accounts are work accounts and I just use the phone to see an answer or respond quickly but can delete knowing that the "real" email is still on the work Mac or home Mac and on the server. I just use the phone as a convenient monitor of the accounts and to respond if out and about in a pinch.

Hi Jen: I'm the one who first posted this almost 2 years ago, but I think whatever changed in the iOS for the phones back then seems to still make this behavior (it coincided with the iPhone no longer letting you choose to only show 50 emails per account.)

The only way I found to "solve" it was to physically log into your mail account server on the web (if its Hotmail or Gmail or a private server), and then create a folder called something like "old mail" or whatever you want, and then move the vast majority of the mail sitting on the server into that folder (and therefore out of the Inbox). Also mark them ALL "read."

I left only a handful of emails in the Inbox that I wanted back on my phone. Then delete the mail account on your iPhone. Shut the phone down and then reboot just for good measure. Re-add the mail account to the phone and see if it (hopefully) will now only download the mail you left in the Inbox on the server.

I set my accounts up as POP (not IMAP) so the phone isn't mimicking the server (therefore my phone won't see whatever folders are on there).

I hope this helps you!

I'm not sure what you mean - I think you are confusing IMAP with POP. IMAP settings is what will make your emails delete from the server in sync with your device or mail account from your computer etc. POP will treat each entity separately so if you delete or file on one device it will NOT mimic that behavior on the server.

I keep all my emails as POP and never removed from the server because I manage many crucial accounts for myself and other people, including critical businesses, so this way I can check an email from home and delete it but its still gonna be in the mail when I get to work, and it will still be on the server in case everyone deleted it from their mail and desperately needs to find it (whether financial or legal.)

Periodically I will go into the servers and manually move and/or delete and clean up email to free up server space. One of the most annoying changes to the iOS a few incarnations ago was the removal of the choice in mail to only download the last 50 emails for each account. Now when you add an email account (say to a new iPhone) down comes zillions of emails from the POP server. sigh….

They are all POP accounts, they are all from different email providers, many from private servers we own and control, some from centurylink, some from gmail, some are private - it doesn't seem to matter.

I've had these in my iPhone for ages and suddenly this afternoon they ALL downloaded 150 max to each account totaling more than 1500 emails ⚠

Now I just tried to delete 15 of them and it says it can't move them to Trash ⚠ what the heck is happening? LOL!

The phone was fine this morning and I have been at work all day without even opening the phone. I just opened the phone this afternoon and sudden'y have all these zillions of emails downloaded.

I just rebooted the phone, tried to manually trash some emails, emptied the trash and before my eyes it redownloaded 250 emails!!!! Good grief!

Thanks for trying to help, but to be honest deleting 15-20 separate accounts and recreating them will be a colossal amount of work - plus anytime I have ever deleted and re-added a mail account, it brings in all the same past tons of emails off the server. I do not want to dump my servers - these are work servers with vital historic emails I purposely keep there in case we ever need to find them again.

BTW, now one account has a bunch of emails dated 12/31/69 - LOL!!!!!

UPDATE:

This is the strangest thing I've ever encountered. Here's a new twist: I have found that if FIRST I manually swipe one or two emails to manually delete, THEN it will let me "delete all" and then I have to also manually swipe/delete a couple of the individual emails from inside Trash (to dump them from Trash) and THEN it will let me dump the trash.

Still it then pulls all the previous 250 emails sitting the server (so now I'm getting ones dated July 2015 and previous) and have to do it again, but then it seems to stop bringing them in.

I don't know if this will hold - but whatever has changed its something that's caused the iPhone mail to pull in 250 emails from their respective servers.

I hope that this will work for good and hopefully it will help anyone else having this oddity!

Sadly - it didn't - it just downloads the NEXT bunch of 250-500 emails chronologically - I have these going back to 2013! Just on one account. sigh…..

It appears that it wants me to run through the entire historical downloading of every email and then delete them, and on and on. Interestingly it recognizes the ones I have already deleted and starts the next download of 500 on the previous date where it left off.

It is basically acting as an iPhone would if you created a new mail account and its downloading all "unread" emails (it thinks you haven't seen yet) off the server.

I'll try and delete the smallest (newest) account and recreate it and see what happens

UPDATE - This theoretically "Fixed" it for me for the moment (going to each server and moving all mail from the inboxes to a new folder called iPhone fiasco), but I don't know that's really a fix.

I have no idea what caused the iPhone to do this, and it can't be the servers, because they are all different on different hosts, and some that are corporations like embark/centurylink or gmail. It is definitely an iPhone issue.

Even when I delete emails, it still shows hundreds of emails in the red badge count and in the overall "inbox" on the iPhone even though when you look at the inboxes of individual accounts they are empty. When you trash emails, they appear to be gone from the inbox, but the count remains in the red badge and the overall "inbox"….. then after a while the trash will "download" a count of what I deleted. Meaning: the phone seems to have an enormous amount of time recognizing that emails have been moved from the inbox to the trash and then recognizing they have been deleted - many times putting the emails BACK into the inbox ⚠ If the overall inbox shows a count of emails, when you look, they are ghosted light grey in color, have crazy impossible dates (like 1969 or 2000) and say "no content" - but they remain in the inbox count.

For the record, I do not open weird emails or attachments so I can't imagine this is a virus - no idea where that would come from magically, since I was doing NOTHING with the phone all day - it sits on my desk waiting for me to leave! LOL!!!!!

I've never had any problem with my iPhones and this one is only 2 months old running the newest iOS. So weird!!!!!!!

I hope this helps someone else…..

Thank you all for helping me!