Phone and deleted emails issue. Apparently insoluble. Help!

[ElectiveAffinities]

If anyone can point me in the right direction here I’ll be eternally grateful because I’m being driven crazy.

Here goes: I have an iPhone - admittedly ancient (7 Plus) but works fine and runs the latest IOS. I have an IONOS email account and I also access it on my phone (set up with SMTP, not POP).

This has always worked perfectly with no issues until a few months ago, when I went to find emails in my inbox - read, but not deleted; just sitting there - and they weren’t there.

By a long process of elimination and after much hair-tearing it’s now definite that SOMETHING is deleting a week’s worth of all emails from my inbox on both my IONOS server and - therefore - my phone, every 7 days. This is recent, this year, so something has started it happening, randomly or not.

IONOS are adamant it’s nothing to do with them. But I’ve checked all phone mail settings and there’s literally nothing saying ‘delete after 7 days’. Everything that can be is set to ‘no limit’ to delete.

The only other variable is that I have a work profile installed on my phone but they, too, are INSISTENT that nothing about that profile could affect my personal email.

Can anyone techy offer any ideas at all? I’m genuinely almost demented with trying to get to the bottom of it. A techy relative (senior in IT) is stumped too….

Are they not stored in the cloud?

No, they aren’t, and what I’m looking for is a solution as to why the emails are being deleted when I haven’t done anything to make this happen!

Disclaimer: I'm not especially techie. But...

Surely the issue is coming from the email provider? Gmail, Outlook, etc,? Because you email is only being viewed on your phone. You can log out of the email on your phone and log into it on a desktop, for example. So any issue with the emails disappearing must be in the settings of the email provider.

I would suspect the work profile. It’s one very good reason for having separate work and personal phones.
have you tried Reddit? I’ve found they usually come up with an answer to this type of thing. (Sorry mumsnet - you are better at other stuff!)

Also possible an IOS update has caused this.

Thanks for the replies. I strongly suspect the work profile too, @Alphabet1spaghetti2 , but they’re absolutely adamant it’s not and I’ve hit a brick wall with them. I might try one more time but it’s frustrating - an overwhelmingly techy male helpline who just sound disbelieving then dismiss me out of hand (and say my ‘personal emails’ can have nothing to do with them as they only deal with the work account. I know that, I’m just trying to discover whether anything hidden in the work settings that I don’t have permission to access is causing this).

My email provider is shared by DH and he isn’t having this issue, which kind of persuades me that the problem isn’t down to them. They also insist it isn’t….there’s definitely nothing in my settings in my webmail - no rules etc - to instruct deletion of inbox after 7 days.

It’s so frustrating.

Not necessarily.

SMTP means that any changes made on one device are mirrored on any others, so if you delete on your phone, it deletes on the IONOS server, move to a new folder, it moves, and so forth....

POP3 gives an option to leave messages on the server, but can get pretty messy when everything inevitably becomes un synchronised.

Any chance your email settings have been migrated to another iDevice like an iPad or laptop that has different settings? or imported into a second mail app on your phone that is overriding the device defaults?

Can IONOS give you an access log or list of devices that are accessing your account?

I can ask them, @FixTheBone - thanks for the useful suggestions. I do have my email on my iPad as well but the settings are all exactly the same, I’ve checked every single thing like a maniac trying to track this down!

I didn’t want to have POP settings enabled precisely because of the problem of having messages in different places, and if I delete something I know I’m fine with it disappearing completely - but these aren’t deleted messages I’m losing, they’re the inbox messages I want to keep and that very much haven’t been deleted.

Hello dears,
I have the exact same problem, except no work email account to deal with. I do all my communications via IONOS webmail and on my iOS 15.7.9 iPhone. As I was doing a search in the search function of IONOS' webmail, ALL my messages in the inbox disappeared. ALL of them! And worst yet, they were not in the trash bin either. And neither in any other folder. Otherwise, it would have been easy for me to move them back into the inbox. So, I requested a IONOS rep call me to resolve this horrendous mystery. They were as stumped as me. They guaranteed the problem is not on their end. They said this was probably being caused by a filter I had set for my email address. I told them I doubt this is the cause because I have not touched this or SPAM settings recently. Both IONOS reps treated me like I am dumb or crazy. I had to pay them 30€ for them to reinstate my messages into a RECOVERY folder. But then, the next day, half the messages disappeared again. So, they performed another recovery free of charge. They said the problem is definitely not on their end. I suspect it is. Any thoughts or similar experience? Please post here. Let's do some collective IT science of our own because IONOS is not providing any. I doubt this has anything to do with Apple because I updated my iOS long ago without any problems. My tech instincts have never failed me. Let's see.

I suggest the following steps to resolve the issue

1. Remove the email account from the phone
2. See if the original issue is still observed. (by checking webmail)
3. If the issue is observed then remove the work email.
4. See if the original issue is still observed.
5. If the issue is still observed, move the email account to a different provider.
6. Cross fingers