Why does my email inbox on my iPad say I am receiving 10 messages and nothing shows up in my inbox?

I hope someone knows : ) I’ve wondered this myself. My yahoo mail does that also. My theory is that it may be that it is counting spam before it’s moved/deleted but I’m not sure.

Tough to tell without playing with it, but a few things to check

> It might be that the mail icon still shows the number from the last time it checked. Especially if you’re just waking it up or you just checked your mail somewhere else the number won’t update until the next refresh
> The messages may be too old to show in the current view, even thought they are “new” they are usually organized by the date in the header, that date can be faked or just wrong
> They could be messages in folders or accounts other than the one you’re looking at right then. If you have multiple accounts or have it set up to check spam/trash folders then it could throw the numbers off

Any of those sound possible?

Is it going straight to your spam folder?

@funkdaddy I think mine is the 3rd option :)

I don’t have a spam folder on my ipad. Not that I know of. It just says, inbox, drafts, sent, and trash.

@JLeslie It is quite possible that it is looking at the spam folder on your server. open the email from the client like yahoo or gmail and delete all spam from there and see if that helps. All the mail app on your iPad is doing is reading the server.

@missingbite That makes sense. Next time it happens I’ll see if I can match it up, to check if that is the explanation. Thanks.

@JLeslie, who is your email service provider? Apple’s .me? Gmail? Yahoo? Hotmail? your local ISP? something custom? In other words, where does your iPad go to download your email?

@robmandu Comcast. All the emails go to my laptop also, so I can compare it to my laptop; see what message maybe made it there and not to my ipad.

Sometimes they are shown like new emails to be downloaded and in reality they are syncronized ones coming from the server… email you already read before… perhaps…

I know that sometimes my iPhone will pull email from Gmail that goes right into the Spam folder… dinging a notification, but not showing anything new in my Inbox.

But right now I’m leaning towards @ml3269‘s idea: that you already read the new email on your laptop or elsewhere… and your iPad dings you when it gets around to pulling those emails down, even though they’re already marked as read… and so it looks like you don’t have anything new.