Why are emails diappearing from my iphone?
January 9, 2020 12:17 PM Subscribe
Just in the last week or two, a lot of emails have been disappearing from my iPhone. The emails still exist on my server, and when I look at Mail on my computer, I have no trouble getting them, so this is something that's happening only on my iPhone. It's also happening on my iPod Touch, though. Why is this happening?
The disappearing emails are all addressed to several email accounts whose mail is all forwarded to my main email address. For example, emails sent to medsubs@[myhostname] or to 12345@[myhostname] are all automatically forwarded to chromium@[myhostname]. I mostly use these accounts for subscriptions.
I can be looking at my email on my iPhone, and I see my test message, sent to 12345@[myhostname], appear in my email on my iPhone just as it should, but then, seconds later, as I am refreshing the email by dragging down on the list (and definitely not clicking on any icon or swiping to either side), the test message simply disappears, right before my eyes, while other emails remain in the list just as they should. A couple of tests (out of dozens) have failed to be deleted, but I haven't figured out why they were spared. I don't always see the messages show up at all, even when watching very closely immediately after sending a test; they arrive as expected on my computer, but not on my iPhone or iPod.
It's not just because the messages have been forwarded. Not all mail that is forwarded in this way is suffering this problem. Mail sent to newspaper@[myhostname] is still working fine. It shows up in my mailbox on my iPhone, and then it stays there, just as it should, unless I actively delete it. As far as I can tell, I haven't missed any unforwarded mail. Test messages sent directly to my main email go through and stick around, just as they should, while tests sent to 12345@[myhostname] disappear after a few seconds.
I have manually searched through every possible folder in my email on my iphone. The missing emails are not in Junk or Trash or Archived or anywhere, although messages I've actively deleted do show up in Trash, as expected. Doing a search within the email program doesn't find them, either. When I send a test message from an email account on my iPhone to one of the problem addresses, it briefly shows up in my mailbox and then disappears, but is still findable as "sent" mail. All test messages that I've sent from the phone are still on my server and on my desktop computer. I tried dragging the mail list all the way down past the oldest messages, in case the phone email just hadn't "seen" the emails I had never received on it, but no change.
The problem began around January 1. I can still see emails from subscriptions that were forwarded to the problem addresses, but there are only a couple of these messages after January 1. Coincidentally, this is when I upgraded the operating system on my desktop computer, an old Mac, from Mavericks to High Sierra. I do have iCloud Mail enabled on my Mac, but only for mail sent to or from my @iCloud.com address; when I log in to iCloud on my Mac, it shows only the tiny number of messages I've ever sent to or from [me]@icloud.com. So I think this means that that should not affect my other email accounts at all.
I changed the setting on my phone under Settings --> Mail --> Messages to "Ask Before Deleting", but it doesn't ask.
Other details: My sixth-generation iPod Touch is using iOS 12.4.3, and my phone is a four-month-old Phone 8 using iOS 12.4. Both received these emails fine up through December 31. The email account to which my mails are being forwarded is a POP account; I'm glad of this because it means that emails deleted on my phone still exist elsewhere, which makes this problem an annoyance rather than the emergency it would be if emails were being deleted everywhere.
Is there anything else I can look at?
The disappearing emails are all addressed to several email accounts whose mail is all forwarded to my main email address. For example, emails sent to medsubs@[myhostname] or to 12345@[myhostname] are all automatically forwarded to chromium@[myhostname]. I mostly use these accounts for subscriptions.
I can be looking at my email on my iPhone, and I see my test message, sent to 12345@[myhostname], appear in my email on my iPhone just as it should, but then, seconds later, as I am refreshing the email by dragging down on the list (and definitely not clicking on any icon or swiping to either side), the test message simply disappears, right before my eyes, while other emails remain in the list just as they should. A couple of tests (out of dozens) have failed to be deleted, but I haven't figured out why they were spared. I don't always see the messages show up at all, even when watching very closely immediately after sending a test; they arrive as expected on my computer, but not on my iPhone or iPod.
It's not just because the messages have been forwarded. Not all mail that is forwarded in this way is suffering this problem. Mail sent to newspaper@[myhostname] is still working fine. It shows up in my mailbox on my iPhone, and then it stays there, just as it should, unless I actively delete it. As far as I can tell, I haven't missed any unforwarded mail. Test messages sent directly to my main email go through and stick around, just as they should, while tests sent to 12345@[myhostname] disappear after a few seconds.
I have manually searched through every possible folder in my email on my iphone. The missing emails are not in Junk or Trash or Archived or anywhere, although messages I've actively deleted do show up in Trash, as expected. Doing a search within the email program doesn't find them, either. When I send a test message from an email account on my iPhone to one of the problem addresses, it briefly shows up in my mailbox and then disappears, but is still findable as "sent" mail. All test messages that I've sent from the phone are still on my server and on my desktop computer. I tried dragging the mail list all the way down past the oldest messages, in case the phone email just hadn't "seen" the emails I had never received on it, but no change.
The problem began around January 1. I can still see emails from subscriptions that were forwarded to the problem addresses, but there are only a couple of these messages after January 1. Coincidentally, this is when I upgraded the operating system on my desktop computer, an old Mac, from Mavericks to High Sierra. I do have iCloud Mail enabled on my Mac, but only for mail sent to or from my @iCloud.com address; when I log in to iCloud on my Mac, it shows only the tiny number of messages I've ever sent to or from [me]@icloud.com. So I think this means that that should not affect my other email accounts at all.
I changed the setting on my phone under Settings --> Mail --> Messages to "Ask Before Deleting", but it doesn't ask.
Other details: My sixth-generation iPod Touch is using iOS 12.4.3, and my phone is a four-month-old Phone 8 using iOS 12.4. Both received these emails fine up through December 31. The email account to which my mails are being forwarded is a POP account; I'm glad of this because it means that emails deleted on my phone still exist elsewhere, which makes this problem an annoyance rather than the emergency it would be if emails were being deleted everywhere.
Is there anything else I can look at?
Best answer: If you have two devices setup, one using POP and one using IMAP, then you can see this behaviour. Setup everything using IMAP and it will behave properly because IMAP is designed to support multiple devices accessing the same email account.
If you want to keep using both then configure the POP client not to delete any emails from the server after downloading them.
posted by Lanark at 6:32 AM on January 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
If you want to keep using both then configure the POP client not to delete any emails from the server after downloading them.
posted by Lanark at 6:32 AM on January 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
Have you accidentally hit the “Show Unread Messages Only” toggle? I’ve done this twice completely inadvertently on the last two iOS updates.
posted by annathea at 12:02 PM on January 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by annathea at 12:02 PM on January 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: It turned out that I had accidentally configured the main email account on my computer as IMAP instead of POP. It seems very odd to me that this affected only some messages and never others. Thank you very much for pointing me in that direction!
Something that helped was that this morning the hard drive my user directories live on on my computer went offline sometime during the night. When I checked messages on my phone when I got up, all those subscriptions were right there, just as they used to be in the morning before the problem started. Then when I got the computer's problem fixed, most of the emails on my phone that had been sent to a particular address went poof.
My test messages are all behaving just as they should now.
I'm very grateful for all of your answers.
posted by chromium at 1:56 PM on January 10, 2020
Something that helped was that this morning the hard drive my user directories live on on my computer went offline sometime during the night. When I checked messages on my phone when I got up, all those subscriptions were right there, just as they used to be in the morning before the problem started. Then when I got the computer's problem fixed, most of the emails on my phone that had been sent to a particular address went poof.
My test messages are all behaving just as they should now.
I'm very grateful for all of your answers.
posted by chromium at 1:56 PM on January 10, 2020
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If you look in your iPhone settings under Passwords & Accounts, for the mail accounts in question, you might have a "Mail Days to Sync" option that you could look at. My iPhone had some troubling email behavior that was related to that setting.
posted by beandip at 1:58 PM on January 9, 2020 [1 favorite]