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
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 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.
Oddly enough, I just deleted my entire account off my phone and redownloaded it and that seemed to take care of the issue. Let’s see if it stays that way. Thank you all for your assistance with this!
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!
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'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….
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 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?
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!
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!
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...
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... 🙂
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.
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
iPhone mail suddenly downloaded thousands of old mail!
