Since upgrading to iOS 18 on my iPhone 14, when searching in Mail, the results are not returning in date order. Emails from 2021 onwards are showing first and then I have to scroll to find the most recent emails, which are then showing in ascending order. Any ideas?
iPhone 13, iOS 18
OMG, the latest iOS update might have changed something and I have found a way to get things sorted. When you do a search for emails where there are years of them, you now get an initial result that has a disclaimer at the bottom saying that “Some results may not appear. Mail downloads and organizes messages when iPad is locked, charging and connected to WiFi. Large accounts like this may take longer.” The search result pulls more old emails and they appear in different order as more are found, putting the newest lower in the result, as before, and you can’t find what you are looking for. BUT if you give it a bit of time and then change the search at the top from “From” to “To” and then back again to “From” the messages now appear in order from newest to oldest! The number of messages that you have from the sender is why people have said that different things work in the past - They must have been searching accounts that are smaller. I’ve tried this toggling now a few times and it has worked every time!
Selecting new message on top in the mail app fixed this for me!
[Edited by Moderator]
This did not work for me, BUT, when I also clicked on organize by thread that worked. Who knows why?
The latest iOS update, as well as the other suggestions made in this thread do not work if there are years worth on messages in the search results. Spoke with Apple support yet again and still no fix. If you are having this problem, call them so they recognize that many people are frustrated by this and it moves up on their priority list.
Still broken on 18.4.1 for me … and turning on the threading doesn’t help (I don’t organize by thread so that may be why). I notice the issue only occurs when searching all mailboxes … if I search the current mailbox it doesn’t happen (at least not as often).
If you do a search for someone where you have years of email the most recent may appear on top but if you let it sit for a bit, the emails will scramble with older email on top and the more recent ones get buried. The toggle of settings, most recent on top, does not work in this scenario.
I have been having the same problem since installing an iOS system update December 2024. I’ve spent hours on the phone with Apple, and hours in person at a genius bar.. Every tech person appears confused as though they have never heard of this before. Are they not permitted to talk about it? That makes me nervous, and why is this only happening to some people? One tech at Apple told me to wait for the new iOS system… Butbad news upon bad news is that tonight I upgraded to 18.3.2 ….. and email search/sort STILL doesn’t work! I’ve tried deleting my mail apps and reinstalling, toggling sort buttons, handing my phone and iPad to a tech so they could try. What to do now?
Well, apparently I can’t edit my post. So let me warn you not to delete your Apple Mail account for Gmail. I had to restore my Gmail account in Apple mail to get all my contacts back! After I did that I rechecked to search mail function in Apple Mail, and it still is broken even afterward. But my Gmail app is working fine for searching emails, so I just use that client whenever I want to search for an email.
Update: I checked the Apple Mail search function two days later and now it is working; so perhaps they just fixed it?
This is still an issue for me. If I swipe down after the search, sometimes it works, sometimes not!
This is also happening to me and selecting “most recent messages on top” didn’t work. Everything showing up from this week is at the very bottom but things that have dates in list view are showing up chronologically. It’s almost like it’s recognizing the days of the week (sent in the past week) as received longest ago, like it’s not looking at the date or year it was sent, if sent in the past week. Would love a fix for this. Email is already overwhelming. Now search doesn’t work.
This does not fix the problem for me either. I have An Apple iphone 16 Pro Max. Using the Mail App. Threaded is turned off. Collapse Read Message is on. Most Recent Message on Top is on. Complete Threads is off. This is unusable in this state.
Is there a fix for this? Incredibly frustrating. When I search for a keyword, I get the most recent results at the top for a split second, but then older emails appear. I then have to scroll (sometimes quite far) down to the “Some results may not appear” message. Then under “server results” I see the most recent results. So how do I get the server results to appear at the top?
NONE of the fixes suggested here worked for me either. (iphone 12 mini, on iOS 18.1.3). This is so frustrating. Because when you use your iphone mail for work, some of these searches yield messages going back for many years—oldest first! I’m currently getting good search results less than 50% of the time. When will they “fix” this? It’s serious problem!!
Ridiculous that this has not been fixed as it renders Mail as being completely unreliable for anything important. I haven’t looked yet but how hard would it be to move old messages into another email program like Outlook?
This is still happening on both iPad and iPhone 16 for me and my wife. I’ve tried all the fixes suggested and deleted and reloaded the mail app.
It is disgraceful that Apple is not working with Google to fix this. As i can see from this thread it has been going on for months.
nb it works fine on an iMac via web browser so clearly it is a mobile device iOS problem.
Ever since I got my new iphone16 my emails don’t sort the way they used to.
when I search for a name or subject it defaults to the most recent which is correct. But then almost immediately it changes & goes to the oldest one first. I find myself looking at emails I sent years ago for something I actually sent a week ago. It’s a pain
I have done a bunch of searches & tried everything I can find. Obviously others are having sort issues as well.
this was not a problem till now upgraded my phone a few weeks ago.
how do I reset it so my search is the most recent emails & not the oldest?
Mail search on iPhone not sorting by date
