I took my new iPad to a meeting yesterday. An issue came up that made me want to look at an attachment to an old email. I whipped out the iPad and found the right folder, but the e-mail wasn’t there. In fact, I could find none of my old emails. When I got home, I tried the same thing on my iPod Touch, with the same results.
This is an interesting defect. The email program works the same way on two devices. On the iPod Touch, it’s not a problem, because the tiny screen does not encourage anything but minimal dealing with urgent emails. On the iPad, the large screen made me want to treat the iPad the same way I treat a laptop with Outlook on it: as a device which gives me access to my entire Exchange mailbox.
I went into the e-mail settings screen, and found the option of downloading up to 200 recent messages, but no option to download everything. That appears to be a limitation of the iPad/iPhone e-mail client. There may be additional limitations due to Microsoft’s ActiveSync connector for Exchange.
In addition, the search function within the email client doesn’t appear to search attachments.
I called tech support at Apple. The techs were helpful and moderately knowledgeable, but they were limited by their training and by the fact that they didn’t have iPads to verify things. One of them suggested a reasonable way to figure out whether the problem was with ActiveSync or with the mail client: setup an IMAP4 mailbox, upload a bunch of messages to it, let them get old, and see if you can see them on the iPad mail client. I don’t think I’ll do that: it’s a lot of time and trouble, and the knowledge gained won’t produce a solution to the problem.
I’ll just dial down my expectations for the iPad and carry my laptop when I need more than casual access to e-mail.
You mentioned this was an “old email.” If you are referencing time, you might want to check the settings in your mail app on the ipad & iPod Touch. Some mail accounts, including Exchange have a function for “Mail Days to Sync” – (No Limit, 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month). This setting works with the “# of recent messages” setting. You might want to bump up the former to No Limit.
Chris,
You are absolutely right. Thanks very much for the pointer. I wouldn’t have found that setting on my own, and, after the change you suggested, the iPad now downloads all the emails in a folder.
Even with the settings change, The iPad won’t download the files to a folder until you open that folder, in contrast to an Outlook client, which will download the contents of all the folders the first time you connect to the Exchange server. This makes the initial setup somewhat laborious, since you have to open each folder and wait ten or fifteen minutes for the download, then go on to the next.
Subsequent syncs should be fast, but not automatic; I’ll still have to remember to open each folder from time to time to get the email downloaded if I want to work offline.
Still, this is a huge improvement, and I am grateful to you for pointing out the fix.
Now, if the email search functions would search attachments, I’d have another reason to leave the laptop at home.
Jim
Under the same Exchange tab that you used to set the number oft days there should be a “Mail folders to push” option. Inbox is set by default but you can also put a check mark next to any others that you want to populate automatically.
Cheers
Andy
Andy,
You are right. I found this some time ago, but I forgot to update the blog. Any way to get the Exchange client to search attachments?
Jim
Sorry, should have spotted that the blog was a year old. Can’t help with searching attachments I’m afraid, but it would be a great feature.
Cheers
Andy