Please help! Problems with iOS default Mail app & Gmail

Hi all,

Not sure if this is a Gmail / iPhone Mail-wide issue, but hoping it is.

I have an iPhone 4 (original) with iOS 7.1. Today, my built-in mail app had issues receiving mail, got some kind of 'cannot connect to Gmail IMAP' error most of the day. It now seems to be able to connect, but my inbox has become frazzled. I can basically only see the two most recently received messages. Every other message I can see in my inbox is an e-mail I have sent (in the list below the two most recent messages I've received). I can't see any of the other messages I've received, scrolling down the list only shows the ones I've sent. It's driving me nuts! I have removed my Gmail account and re-added it, same problem. I've logged into Gmail on the web and everything looks fine, I've even checked on my computer via the Apple Mail app and it all looks alright. Just the iPhone mail...not sure what is up.

Earlier in the day, I used the GMail web interface to organise some e-mails, but my inbox still looks fine. When I log in on the web, I can see all my received e-mails in my inbox...they just won't show in iOS Mail (except for the few from late yesterday), everything else that shows up in my INBOX is stuff that should be in the SENT box.

Any ideas? Hoping some other people have experienced a similar issue! I've removed and re-added the account a few times, no luck.

Thanks.

Thanks for the response. Yes, yes I do. When I go into the 'all mail' folder via this route, I can see e-mails up to this past Saturday evening and then the next e-mail is something from August 2013...all the e-mails before then have disappeared.

This issue is only affecting my iPhone. On my iMac and laptop, there are no issues.

Thanks for the tips, I followed all of these and checked mail on my phone, same issue resides. I even tried removing and re-adding the account, yet experience the same problem.

I download the iPhone Gmail app, which shows e-mails fine, none of the same problems where e-mails before Saturday evening aren't showing. Thing is, I don't want to access e-mail from a separate app, the Mail app was doing fine for all of my accounts. This is extremely annoying.

BrianBaughn said:

Email is set up as IMAP on all your devices, correct?

Also, have you added any subfolders (via your Mac) to Gmail's Sent or Inbox folder?

Click to expand...

Yes, e-mail is set up as IMAP on all devices.

Re. the latter, I don't think I have, but not sure what you mean. Do you mean adding new folders, as in creating them on my device application and not via the web? If so, no.

This problem only seems to exist on my iPhone for some reason. I need to try my mail account on a different iPhone to see if the same problem occurs. If it doesn't, perhaps my iPhone needs a factory reset to resolve this issue?

Now resolved but I have another problem

All sorted now, this was a weird issue with Gmail, not with iOS Mail. I found the following solution on the Apple discussion forums:

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OK I've managed to fix this myself - so I thought I'd share my solution, in case anyone has a similar problem...

Create a new (temporary) gmail label

Working from within GMail's web access - select all of the missing emails TOGETHER WITH the more recent emails (I'll explain why in a minute).

Assign these emails to a newly created label

Archive those emails (Which will make them disappear from GMail's Inbox folder - as that's all that Archive does)

Go to the Label View/Folder for AAA and select all of those emails

Then "Move To... Inbox"

The emails will now show both the "Inbox" and "AAA" labels

With all of those emails still selected... Under "Labels" untick the "AAA" label and click apply

Check in GMail inbox and your mails will be there. Check too on your iOS device and the mails will have reappeared too.

Now back to the question why you have to select the more recent mails which you could already see on your iOS device.... It would appears that iOS Mail sorts the mails on the DATE UPDATED and not the DATE RECEIVED, so if you hadn't select those additional mails, then they would have appeared to have disappeared (in fact just shunted to "Older Mails" even though they had been received more recently)

Link: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3543095

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All my e-mails are now back. Since resolving this issue of missing e-mails in iOS Mail (where I had to mark all e-mails as a new label, archive them, move them back to inbox and remove the new label)...my latest e-mails now ONLY come through on my iPhone. From the time I resolved this issue yesterday, any further e-mails don't come through to Apple Mail on my desktop (the last e-mail I can see is the one I received before I did this fix). I have Mail 4.6 (still running OSX 10.6) and access Mail via IMAP. I have Apple Mail on my laptop which is running Lion and Mail 5.3. No problems with this one though, as latest e-mails show, it's just the desktop one that's causing issues.

I tried removing my Mail account from the app and re-adding it, but it hasn't helped...it still seems to remember all my settings somehow and keeps my old Mail (but can't download new ones since yesterday afternoon).

Any ideas on how to resolve this?

Thanks.