I have not done anything to my iPhone today, and suddenly this afternoon, my mail is showing thousands of unread, old email that downloaded!
What would possibly cause this to occur? It is not my email server, as I have numerous email accounts on different servers.
Did anyone else have this happen today??????
iPhone 6 Running iOS 9.2.1
Thanks!
iPhone 6, iOS 9.2.1
I have had this exact issue since I have had iPhone. Is anyone from Apple actually reading or able to assist with this on this forum?
I have over 9,000 unread emails on my phone. When I go through and delete old emails, it automatically loads more emails from my email account but despite them all being ‘read’ in the past from an actual PC, they still show up as ‘unread’ on my phone.
If I delete 500 emails then 500 more download from the server. I would like to find a way to fix this. This does not happen on my work iPhone server with Outlook- just my personal iPhone with a Hotmail account. To say it is frustrating is a massive understatement.
I tried shutting my mail off, then restarting my phone as suggested before and that didn’t work.
I have had this exact issue since I have had iPhone. Is anyone from Apple actually reading or able to assist with this on this forum?
I have over 9,000 unread emails on my phone. When I go through and delete old emails, it automatically loads more emails from my email account but despite them all being ‘read’ in the past from an actual PC, they still show up as ‘unread’ on my phone.
If I delete 500 emails then 500 more download from the server. I would like to find a way to fix this. This does not happen on my work iPhone server with Outlook- just my personal iPhone with a Hotmail account. To say it is frustrating is a massive understatement.
I tried shutting my mail off, then restarting my phone as suggested before and that didn’t work.
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.
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!
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 don't know what is going on with your phone but try resetting your Mail Accounts and system by following these steps. First close your Mail App completely from the multitasking window by double clicking the Home button and swiping up the Mail preview pane up until it disappears from the screen. You may have to look for the Mail pane by scrawling to the left as there will be other panes there from other apps. Then go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > locate your email provider and click on the account. Then on the next page Delete Account. May have to do this on all your accounts. Then do a forced restart. Hold down the Home and Wake/Sleep buttons at the same time for about 15-20 seconds until the Apple logo appears. Ignore the "Slide to power off" text if it comes up. You will not lose anything. Then go back to Settings > Mail… and add the accounts again. Good luck, hope this helps...
I just had the same thing happen. Over 29,000 unread emails appeared in my inbox. I deleted my account, rebooted my phone, and went to my mail server (Hostway) and only about a week of emails were still there. I deleted everything from the server and resetup my mail on the phone. My desktop iMail program that accesses the same mail account is running fine.
When I resetup the mail account, all the mail appeared again only my account has no folders other than an inbox. No trash, sent, archived, nothing. I can swipe to delete an email but have no idea where it's going. The number of unread emails doesn't change.
This is really messed up. Any other ideas?
I too had the same problem only mine was 22,000. I deleted my mail account, powered down my phone, and allowed a few weeks to pass. Set it back up and it seemed to resolve the issue. Fortunately, I'm not phone dependant and do my daily mail activities on a desktop. I feel it was my mail server not remembering that old mail was already downloaded. It seemed like phantom mail was downloading that was ages old.
Thank you very much for the response and detailed instructions. I do realize this was from 2 years ago which iis why this is so disheartening that it hasn’t been fixed. I will try moving my mail to another main folder to see if that works. I don’t want to Mark all as ‘read’ but perhaps I will try it. I appreciate you being here and for the assistance. I wish Apple would effing fix this. The updates over the last year with the new email inbox displays are just horrid. I really wish the threads were displayed in order the way they used to be. I’m continuously discontent with what Apple has been doing. I wish they would let us customize previous versions of apps and software.
Thanks again!
Hi Jen - I hope it works for you. Just a note - I don't know that you have to mark all the emails on your server as "read" - if there are ones that you want to keep as Unread by all means do that.
I believe (just guessing from my experiences!) that whatever is in the Inbox is what downloads to a new mail account set up on an iPhone. Unless of course you are setting it up as IMAP instead of POP. I believe IMAP makes the server and all other devices mimic each other. So I assume if you made a folder on your server called "Money" and moved emails into it, that folder would also appear on your device (and visa versa). I DO NOT use IMAP so I can't swear by this, but managing my boss' wife's email on her iPad (which is a gmail account) makes me believe so.
If you IMAP, even if you "read" the mail, it will download on your phone to mimic the set up on the IMAPed server. So if you have an inbox with 1,000 emails in it on the server, that will try and come onto your phone. If they appear "read" on your server, they will on your device.
I prefer POP because I use my phone to see if I got answers, or have a check on email at all times, but I can delete on the phone and then its still waiting for me when I get home or work.
Hope I'm making sense. I have no idea why Apple took away the ability a couple of years ago to choose "only show 50 emails" on the phone as it was quite handy.
My suspicion is that the vast majority of users are younger generation who don't care about keeping every documentary email for the past decade. For someone like me with a legal and admin background, I keep everything! And for the last 30 years I've been used to using my Inbox as a "to do" list. When I'm done I delete or file it to a mail folder for keeping. So I never have an Inbox with 500,000 emails in it, but know many people who do...
Hope this helps you!!!! Good luck 🙂
Which email provider(s)?
Is the email all from one of your accounts?
Are these POP or IMAP accounts?
If these are unread emails, had you noticed them missing before?
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!
lilskye wrote:
Thanks for trying to help, but to be honest deleting 15-20 separate accounts and recreating them will be a colossal amount of work.
I understand and agree... Hope your "fix" holds... 🙂
Do you need those emails on the server? One solution would be to delete them from the web portal itself
Also if you set the accounts as IMAP - it should take care of this issue
This all sounds like a server-side issue to me.
I doubt your phone has been holding on to all of those messages for so long. Unless they were somehow marked as ARCHIVED vs. TRASH and something changed all those labels at once, but that is not usually a POP thing, but an IMAP thing.
As was suggested elsewhere... I would go to a web portal for each account and deal with it there. If the server vomiting continues, you may have to reset the phone and/or each mail account. A backup will store your account settings but not the mail itself.
iPhone mail suddenly downloaded thousands of old mail!
