iOS Mail app – vanishing sent mails

[Matthew Morrison]

I’ve had some annoying trouble with the native iOS Mail app (which I’m running on an iPhone 6 with the latest iOS9.x).

A few months ago, an email I had and kept updating in “drafts” simply vanished. Gone. I kept “saving” it, but at some point it vanished. Other drafts carried on fine. But this one nowhere to be seen (not in Trash, not in Sent, not anywhere on the mail server (happens to be Yahoo but that’s irrelevant since it’s an app-level issue) accessed directly from the web.

A few months went by. Last night another had the same issue. I was again livid. This time I googled more – about 45 minutes of research. Finally I found something buried deeply in an interminable bulletin board discussion (and nowhere else). Wow! It turns out if you press and HOLD the “Compose” button in the lower right corner, another version of the draft folder appears but this one has all the main drafts plus the missing ones, if any. I found both the one from last night and the one from a few months ago. Hardly intuitive – in fact outrageous – but yay!, right? I sorted my problem!

Wrong. Gets worse. Since both e-mails were to myself I decided to click send so I can capture them back once for all, never to lose them again. The swoosh sound was heard. The emails both “went out”.

And that’s the last I saw them. Never arrived. Not in Sent mail – neither on the device nor on the server. Not in “Outbox” (a folder which you can never see anyway – you have to put the device in airplane mode for it to appear). Not in drafts – neither server drafts, nor device drafts, nor the “special” device drafts I mentioned above. Gone into a black hole forever. Basically I had my chance and I blew it. I should have copied and pasted the contents into a new email instead of hitting send. Because you know, that’s sensible and what one would think of doing.

Question is this: I’m fairly certain that the missing message is still lingering somewhere inside the app, somewhere where mere mortals can’t see it. It will probably die in there. Is there a way (which would probably require some sort of jailbreaking or otherwise accessing the innards of the iOS Mail app, meaning, the places where it stores stuff that for whatever buggy reason isn’t visible) to find these messages wherever they’re lingering?

Thanks.

[Laurie]

My mother has the same problem with Mail on her iPad. I hope someone helps you with this so we can resolve the issue. Where on earth does it go? It’s extremely aggravating!

[Author]

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