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Jhieminga

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 21, 2021
19
28
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Decided to ask this question here as the iPad Air (1) only goes to iOS 12. My better half uses one for some personal stuff, including e-mail. For years now we have got this set up as follows:
- iPad collects mail via POP3 settings, does NOT delete from server.
- Desktop computer also collects mail via POP3 and deletes from server afterwards.

As the desktop is only used very sparingly, most of the time e-mail will be read and replied to from her iPad. Last couple of months a nagging feature has turned up in that the older e-mails (everything that has been collected and deleted from the server by the desktop PC) are not stored on the iPad. It just states 'this e-mail has not been downloaded from the server' even though she has previously read that e-mail and replied to it from her iPad.

For comparison, my iPhone is set up in a similar way (uses the exact same account, just a different mailbox) and I can read all my old e-mails on it, even though the desktop PC has downloaded everything older than three days ago.

This iPad is also pretty close to full, storage wise, even though there aren't all that many photos and documents on it. It is a 16Gb model of course. I have a sneaking suspicion that the close to full storage has caused it to 'offload' old e-mail messages, but I cannot confirm that.

What it boils down to: does anyone have any tips on how to deal with this? Switching to IMAP is not a solution for us unfortunately as the mailbox size is limited. We would like to get the iPad back to a state where it will once again (it worked for years) retain older e-mail messages.
 
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