How To Get Rid Of Ghost Emails On Iphone

Mail8 I had a weird problem with the Mail app on my iPhone over the last few days. First, I noticed that there were three emails on my iPhone that I could not delete. I would try to delete them, then get an error message that the iPhone couldn't access the mail server. (I forget the exact wording.) But I knew that wasn't right because the Mail app continued to get other messages and would let me delete other messages. Moreover, those same three emails were deleted when I looked at my Inbox on my PC (running Outlook) or on my Mac (running the Mac OS X built-in Mail program). So the messages were indeed gone, but the ghosts of those messages continued to haunt my iPhone's Mail app. Second, I noticed last night that an email that my wife had sent me was not appearing in the Inbox on my iPhone, even though it still showed up in my Inbox on both my PC and Mac.

To remedy this, I went into the Settings app on my iPhone, selected Mail, Contacts, Calendars, then selected the account that I use to sync with the Exchange server at my law firm, and then I scrolled to the bottom and selected Delete Account. My iPhone warned me that this would delete all of the email, calendars and contacts from my iPhone (all of which I sync with Exchange), and I confirmed that was OK. After less than a minute, the process was done.

I then went back to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars and selected Add Account, and then I entered all of the information needed to connect to the Exchange server at my office, such as my username and password. I placed my iPhone close to my Wi-Fi router so that it could access the Internet (and download data) at top speed, and after a few minutes, all of my emails, contacts and calendar entries were re-synced to my iPhone. And sure enough, the email from my wife was right there in my Inbox where it belonged, and the ghost emails were exterminated.

If you find that there is something strange in the neighborhood of the Mail app of your iPhone and you are similarly seeing ghosts of emails that should be deleted or missing emails, hopefully this solution works for you too.

[UPDATE: Several folks have suggested, including in a comment to this post, that another way to solve this problem of ghost emails is to go in Settings to the screen that has toggle switches for Mail, Contacts, etc. (the second picture I posted above) and turn off email. This will delete the email from your device. Then turn on email again and the email will download again. I prefer the way that I did it because it starts fresh with all of my Exchange data, just in case there is anything else wrong that I haven't noticed yet (such as a calendar or contact problem), but the downside is that I did have to re-enter my username and password. Thanks for the suggestions, and let me know if you are aware of any other solutions.]