John01 said:
I have recently joined sky and I am having terrible problems with disappearing emails on my iPad,iPhone and laptop.
I can be looking at an email and suddenly it will disappear and it cannot be found in any other folder and I have even had all of my emails disappear.
It's driving me mad and when I talk to the people at sky and they try to fix it it ends up worse.
Does anyone have similar problems and have they found out how to fix it?
I am looking forward to hearing from anyone who has had similar problems.
Cheers
John
John,
Question. Do you access this problem email account from another device whether it be iPhone, laptop, or mobile phone?
The reason I ask is because I've worked through this type of complaint with others and in many of the cases the vanishing emails while no longer visible on the iPad have been downloaded to the local inbox of another device.
Each device accessing an email account has device specific synchronization, retention, and fetch schedules. Device A may have a delete email from the server inbox once the email is downloaded to the local device inbox. Similarly Device B may have a fetch schedule of lets say every 4 hours where device A is set to push (push is basically telling your email server to replicate incoming emails to the associated device when received).
What I'm getting at is in many cases where multiple devices are set to fetch email from a pop3, IMAP, or exchange account inbox synchronization days, delete from server inbox rules, and other configuration settings can cause grief in the form of the complaint you speak of.
The best way to determine if the emails are still on the server itself is to access the account via a web client. Every email provider I've worked with has such a client and is usually provided in the form of a URL you navigate your browser to, supply your sign on credentials, then access the inbox and other folders directly.
Email clients such as the one provided in iOS use various protocols to access then download email to the local device. This is an important distinction and a concept some tend to overlook as they are under the mistaken impression what the iPad displays is a direct reflection of what the email server itself contains. While this can be true it is certainly not always true. For example if all clients are configured to never delete email from the server and have a synchronization of let's say 2 days defined that device will only display only the last 2 days of incoming mail while the server mailbox has x days depending on retention levels you provided or the mail provider limits you to.
One way to determine if their is a conflict between the devices hitting the account is to disable all but one device from accessing the account and see if the problem you describe persists.
I will be the first to say using multiple devices to manage the same email account can be confusing and frustrating and this is only one potential contributor to the issue you are seeing. If you access the account exclusively from the iPad I would suggest you review all configuration variables that may apply including number of days to sync, deletion of email from server ( I set this to NEVER) so no matter what my local client may be doing I can always fall back to the web client and direct access to the problem account to retrieve "lost" emails.
