POP goes iOS 9
Immediately after I updated my iPad to iOS 9 I got problems: the content and attachments in my emails disappeared. Mail in iOS only says: “The letter has not been downloaded from the server”. New emails disappeared after two days.
It’s a POP3 account that I also have set up on my iMac, but there email is okay. I’ve talked to a member of Apple’s support staff, but he had not heard of the problem and could not help me, so I started a thread on Apple Support Communities with the title ‘Problems with Mail in iOS 9’.
As I write this, iOS 9.01, 9.02 and 9.1 have appeared without the problem being solved and the thread I started is now 12 pages long, with over 200 people reporting the same problem with their POP3 accounts.
I and many others have reported the problem to Apple, but to no avail. I have come to a temporary solution: I have my original POP3 account on my iMac. In my account settings, under Advanced, I discovered that the setting ‘Remove copy from server after the message has downloaded’ was set to ‘After two days’. I changed this to ‘When it has been moved from the Inbox’. There is no option to never remove messages.
Before I updated to iOS 9, I was able to download entire emails from my POP3 account to my iPad, but now they are just linked to the server. As long as the message remains on the server, the content is visible on my iPad. But I must be connected to the email server all the time to show them. If I am offline, I can not see the content, which is a problem for many of us who use iOS devices and want to review old emails when travelling. Danny Bengtsson Alex Blake says… We’ve tried this ourselves, setting up a Gmail account using POP3 on an iPad Air 2 and we haven’t been able to replicate your issue. All of our emails downloaded fine and didn’t disappear even when we went offline (although embedded images did). The only thing we can think of is that this has something to do with the particular mail service you’re using, but without having any further details it’s difficult to know for sure. It might be wise to consider moving over to an IMAP account for your emails, if this is possible, as IMAP is much better at managing email across multiple devices.