Serious prob: mail comes back even tho deleted at server!

[kenatease]

I'm not sure which generation of iPad this is but I guess it's about 6 or 7 years old (wild guess). The model number is MC954LL/A and the version (of software?) is 9.3.5. That's all that I can readily find under "About", in settings.

It's my wife's device so I apologize but yes I can see the bad behavior myself when I've tried to resolve the issue upon her pleading.

There are a few different mail accounts but I am concerned about one for now. It is a standard POP and SMTP serving set within the locally popular ISP, Suddenlink.net. Mail is fetched just fine and dandy and I presume it can be sent without difficulty as well. Problem is, my wife is neglectful and her inbox seems always to be jam packed with junk. Mind you, the account is CLEARLY set to "Delete mail from server when it is moved out of the Inbox" - NO QUESTION OF THAT. But it doesn't seem to work. Recently she (wife) tried a "Trash All" and it did move the mail to Trash but minutes later it came back to inbox. In fact I believe it was in BOTH places but for some inexplicable reason the Trash number of items was slightly lower. This is all so danged spooky!!!

I can READILY reproduce this odd behavior so you wizards out there tell me what to try next. But wait, I've barely just begun! When I delete everything in the Trash and go back to the list of boxes in that account, it still shows a non-zero item count; yet when I enter the Trash it gives me that big "NO MAIL" sign. And by now the Inbox is full again with the precise same mail I've deleted! (over 200)

But hey! I got this bright idea to go into my wife's mail (with her permission, silly!) at Suddenlink's WEB INTERFACE. Okay, there are the 229 items of mail. I Trash them all then go into the Trash and delete them all handily, with minimal effort. And sure enough, Suddenlink reports that I am now using ZERO megabytes of my mail storage allotment, when earlier it was 9+. So those nasty junk mails are truly deleted from the server.

But when I go back to the iPad, it's the exact same story as before: Inbox eventually gets all its former contents back and attempts to Trash them don't appear to work as expected. WOW, WHAT an AWFUL MESS!!

PLEASE HELP! This is disastrous goings on!

 

[Jupiter7]

The setting in your Mail may be to delete from server, but have you checked the time frame? It is often set to delete after 7 days for a POP account.
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[kenatease]

I am NOT a happy camper. Yes it was set for 7 days and so I decreased that time frame as far as permissible, down to one day. But I don't honestly believe that setting pertains directly to my current crisis. But perhaps I am past the crisis now anyway. The mail message count still shows 227 for that mailbox AND for that account AND for "Unread" AND for "All Inboxes", but when I open that affected Inbox it says "NO MAIL" in big letters. This could be relief at last. Maybe I'll know better tomorrow (possibly because of that rather lame "one day" minimum setting for actual deletion). I won't be bashful about posting back into this thread if the problems continue. I may post to let readers know if the problem reaches some perfectly satisfactory resolution, which I very much doubt. Thank you all!

 

[giradman]

@ Kenatease - this has been an occasional complaint here and elsewhere; I'm sure that you've google something like "how to stop deleted emails from coming back" and have received numerous hits - if not, then give that phrase a try. As to your iPad, the model is an old iPad 2 (Wi-Fi only) first released in 2011 (see pic below from HERE).

As to the mail issue, check the iCloud settings on the device, i.e. if you have deleted all of her emails from the ISP's server, then a question is whether the mail is stored 'elsewhere'. Also, if she no longer needs any of these messages, then you might want to DELETE her account on the iPad and set it up again (also switching mail options from POP to IMAP could make a difference, if that is an offering?). Finally, there must be some 'junk filtering options at the ISP web-based client? Dave
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[kenatease]

Thanks; I found some threads over at Apple Discussions with that search and read a 4-page one that had been marked "solved"; but it wasn't solved at all, except a reference (external link) to a solution where/if IMAP is in use, which in my case does not apply. I think I'll try deleting and recreating my affected mail account. You gotta pardon my exasperation but this really sux.

 

[kenatease]

And as for junk mail filtering by ISP, yes there are some settings at the Web interface and I see I have it set for "Delete junk mail" (before it gets ANY further, that is). But that feature appears to be null and not working. Maybe I have to create some specific mail Filters for the junk feature to work. 'Will attempt to plumb further but I dunno -- pretty old and useless anymore am I.

 

[kenatease]

I have to give up as this is just too too damnable and impossible. I deleted the account and recreated it yet the 227 mail messages were still there! (BTW, prior to deleting the account I saw that 7300+ mail messages spontaneously appeared under the category "flagged", OMG!!!) But now something is different: If I open that mailbox and tell it to Trash All, I get an error message saying the iPad was unable to move messages to the Trash. BTW there is no Trash folder so maybe that's why. I figured creation of a Trash folder is automatic when you create a mail account. No? 'Guess I'll have to try and make a Trash folder. And a "Sent"?? ALL there is is an Inbox. This device is totally WORTHLESS for use as a mail client, YEEWCH!!

 

[twerppoet]

In the long run, the best thing to do is move her to a more modern acount with IMAP. Gmail can be set up so that it checks older accounts for mail. By using this feature she can get a new account that works, while still getting email from the old account.

Ideally, she would keep sending out her new email to contacts until the old email account is all but unused, then close it.

Another reason to get rid of the old ISP email account is that it is not portable. If you move or have to change your ISP for any other reason, you'd have to swithc email accounts anyway. By moving to a non-ISP email account like gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc. you're making sure you can keep your email no matter wher eyou move or get internet access from. Well, as long as that company doesn't fold. Microsoft (hotmail) and Google are good bets. Apple's email is also pretty good, though it might feel weird using an Apple ID account if you ever left the hardware behind.

If that's too much trouble, double check with your ISP. Some of them offer IMAP settings in addition to POP (and fail to advertise it). Switching to their IMAP servers would solve your short term problems.

 

[kenatease]

I am extremely thankful for the help. The crisis appears to have passed now, thank goodness. And even if it hadn't I would have had numerous viable options, such as one of the snazzy email apps free from the app store in lieu of Apple's built-in client. Like Spark for example. Or my ISP's Web interface for its emails. Anyway, I don't know precisely why it got better today. I deleted that mail account again. It took a long long time, maybe 4 minutes or so. Maybe I had failed to wait long enough yesterday and the deletion failed to complete? 'Just a thought. Y'know, I don't think I even checked the Inbox for those 227 messages before I deleted that account again. Maybe they were already gone, due to that one-day setting for when to rid deleted messages. Maybe that was at the heart of the entire problem - not sure. I deleted the account and added it back in and the many messages were finally absent. And I chose one of the newer downloaded messages to delete and it deleted correctly, the mail client correctly creating a Trash folder on the fly. (You'll recall that yesterday I got an error message when I added the account back and tried to delete all 227 before the Trash folder had been created.) Then I deleted another and still all is well.

ALL APPEARS to be well again, and now I even appreciate my many options for alternatives if the bugaboo happens again. I'm happy once again and I have you respondents to thank. THANK YOU!