I’m wondering if anybody else has seen this and figured out how to fix it.
My wife reads email on both her up to date M4 IPad Pro and her up to date iPhone 15 but mostly on the iPad, connecting to the same IMAP account they’ve always been. Her Unread messages number on the iPhone is not correctly updating to reflect what is shown on her up to date M4 Air, iPad, and the web page for her email. What this means is she deletes a couple hundred email on the iPad but they never disappear from the iPhone.
She has clearly determined that this is my fault since I’m the family IT department and that I’m responsible for fixing it.
My original suggestion to just ignore the extra Unread emails on the iPhone was disapproved because…the number bothers her.
So I googled and tried a bunch of suggested solutions with random combinations of things like cycling Airplane mode, quitting Mail, checking settings (they’re right) and rebooting. The only two suggestions I haven’t tried yet are to delete the iPhone Mail app folllowed by a reinstall of it from the App Store and removing then re-adding the account in question…which I’m willing to try but they’re more work to get things all setup again so I’m hoping for a simpler fix.
Any good ideas before I try the harder solution…and if so should I try the delete the app or delete the account first? If I could delete the Envelope Index file that would probably fix it but you can’t do that on iOS.
I don’t understand why it’s my fault…but after almost 50 years of marriage I just accept the blame anyway…happy wife happy life ya know…and I am the IT department.
Do they never disappear or does it just take a while?
I’ve found, for instance, then when I delete mail messages from Yahoo’s web-mail interface, the messages don’t disappear from my phone for a while (sometimes as long as an hour). Even if I swipe-down to force a refresh.
I’ve assumed that Yahoo takes a while to propagate changes to their IMAP server.
Frustrating indeed! I take it this isn’t an Apple email account.
You might have tried all these ideas on the iPhone, short of deleting are re-up-setting:
Mail > Mail Accounts > (account): cycle Mail/Notes/Calendar on and off
Mail > Mail Accounts > (account) > Account Settings > Advanced > Mailbox Behaviors/Deleted Mailbox and of Archive Mailbox: check the settings are as desired
Mail > Mail Accounts > (account) > Account Settings > Advanced > Move Discarded Messages into: check setting, maybe change it forth and back
Mail > Mail Accounts > (account) > Account Settings > Advanced > Deleted Messages/Remove: change the setting
Mail > Mail Accounts > Fetch New Data: doubtful this will help but maybe some jiggering here will knock the digits into place
I am also the volunteer family IT support, 34 years here. Hopefully something along this Topic thread will solve it. Be sure to take 100% credit for it when it does!
I had this happen last week. I had an email that showed up on my iPhone for a document signature and I thought I could handle things better if I was working on it from my Mac. I went to the mac and it was not there. I tried to sync the accounts, quit and restarted Mail, and even tried a Rebuild (which seemed to do nothing) and the action area would say that 56 new messages were downloading, but it never finished. I ended up dealing with it on my iPad , but today all the mails are mostly synced, but Mail is showing 2 New Messages and the action bar remains at halfway. Mind you I have processes going on in the background involving resizing photos and videos, but it shouldn’t take hours to download emails.
I had frequent problems like this and what I ended up doing is switching to a mail provider that supports ActiveSync (Exchange). No more imap for me. Not a big help to solve your problem, but perhaps commiseration is something.