Recently I had an email with a few attachments that wouldn’t leave my iPhone’s outbox! It showed a spinning wheel and seemed to hang there for days. And that was utterly destroying my battery AND unnecessarily consuming data. If this situation sounds like you, here are some tips to remove stuck or unsent email from your outbox.

Related Articles

• Customize Your iPhones Mail Attachment Options
• Fix Unable to Move Message in Mail
• Customize Your iOS Mail Gestures

Emails sometimes get stuck on their way to the destination. You often find these emails stuck in your “outbox” folder. On its own, it is rarely a big problem however the problem can get magnified when the email size is huge in that it contains several attachments or photos, videos, music, and media files. This often leads to battery drain issues consumes lots of cellular data on your phone as well. You fix this problem relatively quickly by removing the “stuck” message from your iOS device by following the steps below.

Before you proceed to remove the email, please make sure that the account setting is right on your phone. If you are using Gmail, please Check your Gmail account settings to verify that you haven’t entered your account information incorrectly. To do this, tap the “Settings” app and tap “Mail” or “Mail, Contacts, Calendars.” Tap your Gmail account and verify the information on the screen. If your account settings are right and the phone is connected to cellular and wifi without any issues, you can proceed to these steps below.

Remove Stuck or Unsent Email From Your Outbox

Step -> 1. Switch your phone to Airplane mode

Step-> 2 Open Mail’s Outbox

Once your phone is in Airplane mode, open the Mail app and Go to the Outbox

 

Step ->3 Click the “Edit”

It’s the button on the top right of the screen, followed by checking on the circle next to the “stuck” email that you want to delete

Step-> 4 Click “Trash” or Swipe to Delete

Trash is on the right bottom of your screen to remove the message

Step-> 5 Turn Off AirPlane Mode

Switch your device out of the Airplane mode and return to the mail app.

You should no longer see the stuck message on your email outbox.

Step-> 6 Reboot

Finally, power down your iPhone and then start up normally. If that’s not working, perform a forced restart by holding down both the Power and the Home or Volume Down buttons until you see the Apple Logo.

AND, if it does not work on your first try, try it again! It may take a few attempts

Reader Tips 

• I fixed it by following these steps, in this order:
  1. Go to mail account setting and turn off mail
  2. Turn on airplane mode
  3. Go to Mail and then you should be able to clear stuck message by sending to trash
  4. Turn airplane mode off
  5. Turn mail back on in account settings
• I went into settings, turned on airplane mode, turned off both wi-fi and cellular data. Then I went into my mail app, found the edit function and swiped to delete
• A video file was stuck in my outbox for weeks. I deleted that particular email account from my phone and then reinstalled it. All of my emails came back as they were already on the email server. Once the reinstallation was complete, the file that was stuck in the outbox was gone!
• I completely shut off my phone and rebooted. Then turned it back on and after launching mail outbox, the edit button was available and was able to trash the message
• I had to close the multitasking windows, but once I did, the edit button displayed and I put that file in the trash!
• I Had the exact same problem as you did. What helped me was to reset the phone .. just close & restart the mail app (while in airplane mode) and it works

Please let us know if you had any issues in removing the items by providing your comments below.