Missing iCloud Emails

[EastHillWill]

I’m having an issue where, all of a sudden sometime between last night and this morning, a bunch of my iCloud emails have disappeared. The last one I see now was sent 12/26/20, and while it’s not my primary account I‘ve used it quite a bit since then. (Including some important ones yesterday.) Has anyone else noticed this issue? They’re gone from the Apple Mail app on all of my devices as well as a third party email service I use. I’ve quite honestly looked everywhere, in every folder manually and via search, with no luck. Very strange/concerning.

 

[0128672]

Yeah, concerning indeed! I'd feel the same way. Could we have more details?
What macOS version on which Mac are you running?
Are they also missing from iCloud.com?
Do you have any filters applied?
Are the missing emails from a specific sender or server?
Are they missing from after 12/26/20 or before (not clear from your description)?
And just to be thorough, any changes to your mailbox behavior settings or any new rules?
Have you tried rebuilding your Inbox or any other troubleshooting steps?

 

[Ellen]

Hi was your issue ever solved? The same thing happened to me overnight. Sent mail is unaffected, but Inbox only gives back to 2/2 now. And most distressing, all my devices and iCloud.com are affected.

 

[EastHillWill]

Yeah, concerning indeed! I'd feel the same way. Could we have more details?
What macOS version on which Mac are you running?
Are they also missing from iCloud.com?
Do you have any filters applied?
Are the missing emails from a specific sender or server?
Are they missing from after 12/26/20 or before (not clear from your description)?
And just to be thorough, any changes to your mailbox behavior settings or any new rules?
Have you tried rebuilding your Inbox or any other troubleshooting steps?

I haven't been on in a bit, thank you for responding!
-Big Sur 11.2
-Yes
-No filters
-All emails, don't see any common threads
-Post 12/26
-No changes
-Tried a rebuild, no change

 

[EastHillWill]

Hi was your issue ever solved? The same thing happened to me overnight. Sent mail is unaffected, but Inbox only gives back to 2/2 now. And most distressing, all my devices and iCloud.com are affected.

Nope! One of the missing emails I sent did show up, in a way, as a quoted response I received. That's the only trace of one of the missing emails I've seen. Everything seems to be working as of a week or so ago, but that black hole is still here. Almost seems like a server went offline? I'm not enough of an expert to know for sure

 

[0128672]

I haven't been on in a bit, thank you for responding!
-Big Sur 11.2
-Yes
-No filters
-All emails, don't see any common threads
-Post 12/26
-No changes
-Tried a rebuild, no change

Good to hear back from you, but based on your answers, I'm as baffled as you are. I keep an eye on Apple's Server Status page (https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/) whenever there seems to be an iCloud issue, but where this is an ongoing issue for you, it doesn't help at all. Are you going to contact Apple Support perhaps?

 

[EastHillWill]

Good to hear back from you, but based on your answers, I'm as baffled as you are. I keep an eye on Apple's Server Status page (https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/) whenever there seems to be an iCloud issue, but where this is an ongoing issue for you, it doesn't help at all. Are you going to contact Apple Support perhaps?

I considered it, but as you alluded to it's such a tricky issue that I'm concerned we would just spin our wheels for a couple hours and never accomplish anything. Since the mailbox seems to be working now I may just move on from this particular mystery. The 'proof of life' email I mentioned--the one that showed up nested in a response--was the most important missing one, and I now know that it made it to the recipient, so presumably anything else missing did as well. If this were my primary email it would be a different story, but in this case, 🤷‍♂️

 

[Cloudsurfer]

Sorry for bumping up this thread, but I was wondering if someone knows more about this now that a couple of months have passed?

I also have a huge gap in my received and sent history. All my emails from 2021 and 2020 are just gone. On top of that, all my emails are now going straight to junk. I have to manually check everything in junk and drag it into my inbox to exclude it from the junk folder. It’s particularly annoying when I mail a new contact, their reply will always end up in junk first.

It seems these issues just started overnight a couple of weeks ago. I needed a receipt from 2021 and just couldn’t find it no matter what. That’s how I discovered the huge black hole in my history. It’s almost like they reconfigured something over at Apple and something went wrong.

Needless to say I’m having a hard time trusting Apple mail at the moment.

 

[BARSTL]

I have having a similar problem. Everything in my iCloud inbox simply disappeared. It had all been there when I checked my phone around 8:00 in the morning and was all gone by 10:00. I had not upgraded, changed accounts, or done anything by try to check my mail. I have spoken with Apple, and they have restored some of my recent mail, but by no means everything that was there. My case is still open. I had thought my mail was secured in the cloud. I don't even know if there is a way to back it up to one of my devices.

 

[kdadchait]

an old thread, but im having this exact problem. my emails from the first time i started using icloud, so id say about 2018, till my most recent, have all disappeared! for some reason the only ones that were left were the emails i had received within the week of the disappearance. its very stressful as i had many confirmation emails with important reference numbers, and even an email that i had to reply with within a certain time frame, which im unable to do now.
tried contacting apple but they couldn't seem to help, so im kinda at a loss rn. seems no one was able to find an answer tho unfortunately
i would've thought they were backed up by icloud as most of the older ones have been passed through when i upgraded phones,but for some reason i cant even access them through that!

 

[phuang]

Anyone have any up to date solutions for this. I just found out over the weekend that I only have emails going back to June and over 10 years of email have disappeared. I don't have any junk filters going and my emails are never deleted. This is only for the icloud email. I've also noticed alot of emails automatically going into my junk/spam folder for icloud even though i have this turned off... Once again I thought I had this backed up on icloud but none of it can be found..

 

[Ellen]

I had a similar issue a few years ago and spent many hours on the phone with Apple Support - they were calling me back every few days - and sent them log files from my devices more than once that they forwarded to engineers to review. Whatever the problem was it seemed to be at their end (and maybe not just my account) and one day, finally, the emails came back. Tho if I log into iCloud.com the number of emails there is slightly higher than the number I see when I use the mail app on my laptop.

So if you can ask support to escalate your case and involve the engineers, you might get more assistance. (I had AppleCare so I don’t know if that made a difference with my level of support.)

Also, did Apple try to restore your account? If the emails are still on their server they should be able to do that.

I hope you get your emails back!

PS - I wish Time Machine backed up iCloud emails. For me, at least, it is otherwise a good program.