iOS9 iPad keeps retrieving very old mail IMAP?

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Level 1

30 points

iOS9 iPad keeps retrieving very old mail IMAP?

I'm at my wits' end. Does iOS automatically convert the iPad mail accounts to IMAP? I have a huge archive of mail on my MacBook Pro, and I do NOT want all of that clogging up my iPad, so I set it up to have POP accounts. But now I am randomly getting absolutely HUGE piles of mail going back at least a year or two or more in big lumps. I delete everything. I empty the trash. I have emptied my SERVER from both the iPad and the MacBook PRO constantly. NOW I have a batch of hundreds, or more like thousands of emails, which I have deleted at least five or six times in the last two days. I mean I have deleted the SAME mails, which then return. I have done a restart of the machine with no joy. Just out of the blue mail that has been deleted from the MacBook pro AND the server just comes back like a zombie. In addition, I get to a situation where the mailboxes report no mail at all, but the icon for MAIL shows a big backlog of unread emails.

Is it converted to iMap and insisting on syncing with my MacBook Pro? If this is an unavoidable option, I'll have to ditch the stupid iPad. HELP!

iPad, iOS 9.2.1

Posted on Apr 29, 2016 3:58 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

ManSinha

Level 6

12,171 points

Apr 30, 2016 3:14 PM in response to Owen Daly1

Ok - couple of things

Best of my knowledge - the iPad does not sync with MBP

Secondly go into Settings - Mail, Contacts Calendars - go into the mail account in question - if it says something like iCloud SMTP Server or Yahoo SMTP server - it is IMAP

Thirdly - have you had a chance to directly log on to the web portal of the email provider? So for Yahoo email it would be mail.yahoo.com - and detailed the emails from there? It is understandable that you want to retain them on the Ma and IF your Mac account is POP - deleting them from the server will NOT delete them from the email client - nonetheless you can make a copy of the mail folder and store it elsewhere for additional security and peace of mind

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Answer 2

Owen Daly1 Author

Level 1

30 points

Apr 30, 2016 3:21 PM in response to ManSinha

Thanks, ManSinha, this was helpful. I can report that completely deleting both of my email accounts from the iPad, and then creating the same accounts from scratch, which among other things, in the deletion stage, erases ALL onboard mail, seems to have done the trick. The mail that kept coming back Zombie-style, I hasten to explain, had been deleted from the main server long before, which is what made this so very weird. This means that over a year's worth of bloat, including spam that got filtered on the MB Pro, was not only on-board the iPad, but was completely hidden. I wonder if anyone has a take on how THAT could have happened.

Clearly the account I host on the server of my own website, provided by my hosting company, and using my own domain, is still and always was a POP account, but in making the new Comcast account, I didn't even get the choice between POP and IMAP (as I did in rebuilding the other account).

It would be nice if anyone had a theory about what was actually going on. I generally remove stuff quickly from the Comcast and my domain servers, since I have easy enough ways to backup and save the mail locally, but I really need to be able to prevent deleted mail from the MacBook Pro turning up on the iPad, which it has always done.

ESPECIALLY since there was no "select-all" to clean out the iPad. I would leave it unused for three or four days, only to find a backlog of two or three hundred emails, which could only be deleted manually, poking at the damned little buttons one at a time. The fake select-all trick involving holding things and using the MOVE button would simply choke and freeze dealing with this much volume, and the new "trash all" was hopeless in keeping the zombies at bay.

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