Comments on: iPhone – This message has not been downloaded from the server

By: Robert

Robert — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 11:58:22 +0000

I have had my iPad only a few days but am already frustrated with this problem. I use outlook on my MS Laptop, a Nokia phone and now my iPad for my POP email.
I have never had any problems on either my Laptop or my Nokia phone so the problem is in the iPad or the settings, even although the settings in the Nokia phone and iPad are identical.
It seems nonsense that the iPadonly downloads heading and not the whole email… because I have tested this and in my case, downloads the whole message in one go.

However, I seem to have more trouble with large messages than with short ones and wondered if the iPad was timing out during the email recieve process.
I remember a problem I had once with TalkTalk who I use currently and had to modify my MTU setting in my router because I could not recieve large emails … is there a setting like this in the iPad that is incorrect… such that the message fails if over a certain size? Just a thought.

By: Jason

Jason — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 21:18:31 +0000

I agree that the iPhone is trendy, but not about it’s business usage. I have phones from various vendors that I carry around with me for testing. They all have strengths, but as far as business use or anything else the main difference is just the way they are marketed.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 09 May 2011 15:41:34 +0000

I would say try to do some troubleshooting to figure out if you can reproduce the problem consistently. If you can do that, then you should be able to go to Apple support online or the genius bar and demonstrate your situation. If the problem can’t be reproduced consistently, then it makes it much more difficult to solve.

It simply has to be something with your particular setup. I don’t mean to say it is your fault or even anything obvious. It probably is some obscure side effect that a normal user would have no way of knowing. With the popularity of the device if this was a wide-spread problem we would all be seeing it in the news or at least tech blogs. There are a lot of posts on the Apple support forum but most of them are quite old before the iPhone supported IMAP.

Just to repeat – I know for a fact that it happens when the message is no longer on the server. One way to check this is if your email host has a web client or you can SSH in and directly look at the mailbox (not through a desktop client) and really see what is on the server. Because when you use the phone or a desktop client you are always looking at a copy of the mailbox.

By: Nick Coote

Nick Coote — Sat, 07 May 2011 11:18:31 +0000

I totally agree with David Murray.
* It IS a problem with the iPhone/iPad – I don’t have this problem with my mail accounts using any other email client with any other OS
* I confirm it has nothing to do with settings on other email clients as my iPhone or iPad are in the first line of retrieval.
* it seems to be random and is a real pain
* If the problem is that “it is not meant for business use” (quote from above) then think again – even as a non-business application, isn’t the email that somebody has sent supposed to be readable by the recipient??

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:25:14 +0000

If you’re using IMAP there’s a setting on the iPhone. Go to Settings -> Mail -> (your account name) -> Account -> Advanced

You may need to specify your Trash folder. When you delete a message on the phone, it should move it to the Trash folder on the server. There’s also a setting to specify when you delete a message on the phone, when it will be deleted on the server.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 23:50:41 +0000

It’s not really a flawed analysis, but obviously there are other scenarios. What I can say is that the iPhone automatically downloads only the headers. When you go to view the message it will retrieve the message body. It does this by contacting the server and asking it for the message with the specific message ID that it was given in the headers. Well that’s the way all emails clients work anyway. I’ve written email client software in the past, but it’s been a while. This is basically the same regardless of POP or IMAP.

When you get this error – for whatever reason the iPhone couldn’t get the message from the server. Basically the email client says “give me email 12345″ and the server returns “there is no email with id 12345.” So the iPhone has still the headers for the message but a message with that ID is not on the server. One reason that I have verified is that another client has deleted the message from the server, as I write about in this article. I don’t know other reasons, but it could be that the message IDs are getting screwed up, there’s a network error, there’s some incompatibility with a particular server software or even a bug in the iPhone Mail app. Unfortunately I don’t have the answer.

If I were to trouble-shoot this issue what I would do is use a packet inspector on my network or something to see what the iPhone is actually sending to the server. You would have to turn off email encryption to do this and use a hub (not a switch) so you can inspect packets from another computer. I would probably look at the message IDs and see if the iPhone has the wrong ID or something. Obviously this is something only a network admin type of person is going to do. So unfortunately it’s not a solution, but it is probably the only way to really see what’s happening under the hood.

By: David Murray

David Murray — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 20:33:43 +0000

This is a very flawed analysis of the problem. I have tried switching to IMAP and it has made absolutely no difference. Moreover, my mail downloads from a server that retains copies of all mails and does not alter their status in any way when any given client downloads them, so that they may be downloaded by multiple clients; so the suggestion that this is some kind of timing problem does not hold water. Furthermore, I am experiencing the problem even when I ensure that the iPhone is the first device to download any mail. Testing also shows the problem to be random – if the same mail is sent multiple times, it will generally download perfectly but 10% to 20% of downloads will exhibit the no content problem. My mobile provider appears to have no solution to offer and Apple have no interest at all in providing support.

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:30:38 +0000

How do you manage to delete the messages from you iPhone? I have a series of emails with this issue but the phone will not delete any of them, I just get an error message when I try.

Thanks

By: Ken

Ken — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:48:41 +0000

I have set my Outlook as proposed leaving messages on the server and I still get the problem regularly. I can even have Outlook closed off so that it is not retrieving mail and I still get the problem. For example I was away on holiday for 2 weeks with everything at the office shut down and I still received this message on some e-mails. And of course it’s always the messages that I really need to read!

By: Sue

Sue — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 06:12:19 +0000

This definitely works if you’ve been using a POP3 setting on your iPhone/iPad. By changing to IMAP, it seems to fix itself and download all emails with their content, not just some.

Thanks for this post – it saved me from losing 6 customers all having the same problem and all blaming the web server I provide.

But why can’t Apple and web hosting companies like eNom provide this simple answer. Apple blamed the web hosting and eNom blamed Apple.
And I was caught in the middle!!
Thank goodness for blogs – well done.