There were a number of reports on the interne that in iPhone 3.0 a bug was discovered which kept email messages on POP accounts from being properly deleted on the iPhone. What would happen was that they were deleted from your mailbox on the server and on the iPhone but you could still use the iPhone’s built-in search facility to find the deleted email and re-instate it. This was a bug and it was believed that Apple was aware of the issue and that a fix would likely appear in the 3.1 update.
The original bug demo is still available on You Tube for anyone wanting to take a look. It’s good to see Apple doing some good work here as I can confirm that the bug has been resolved in iPhone OS 3.1. Good news for those of you worried about the security implications of this bug!
I have an issue with email in iPhone 3.0 and 3.1 in which the iPhone will delete all email on the phone and on the server at what appears to be random times. Any ideas on why this is happening?
By: Randy on September 16, 2009
at 11:53 pm
Hi Randy, are you using hosted Exchange or Gmail, Live.com or some other provider using POP3/IMAP? In my hosted Exchange environment I haven’t noticed any mail being deleted either on 3.0, 3.0.1 or 3.1. I’m however using an iPhone 3GS.
If mail’s getting deleted on the server too, this sounds to me like it’s not probably an iPhone specific problem, but either something on your Exchange server, or maybe your mail client. I would suggest if it’s something you can reproduce pretty extensively, then I would try and not run any mail clients against the server and see if you can reproduce it. I’m wondering if what might be happening is mail is coming in and you have a client side rule, e.g. in Outlook that might be moving mail to a PST, or perhaps to your junk mail filter? Or maybe you have a server side rule setup that is moving rule based on some criteria you set in the past?
I wouldn’t rule it out as being a problem on the iPhone, but it sounds like it’s more a server or client based problem. If you’re using IMAP and not Exchange then that would possibly explain it as I’ve seen this happen on IMAP quite a bit and it’s not related to iPhone. If you can provide me with your configuration, I’ll see what else I can suggest.
By: Dave Burrows on September 17, 2009
at 6:27 am