I emptied all the mail accounts on my iPad and now it says my Inbox has 16,626 emails.

What's with that?

I had that happen to me also on my iPad 2. The only way out of it was to erase the iPad and reinstall. Had to do it twice. So far so good. Mine happened a few weeks ago.

How did you empty the mail?

I suspect it wasn't the 'country way': driving by the inbox at 60 mph (ca 100 km/h for those in the Okanagan) and hitting it with a baseball bat — although that could solve the problem.

Just a straightforward select and delete.

Earlier this morning I found a way to get rid of the count by going to notifications/mail and toggling off the badge icons. That got rid of the count and I figured I could get along without any count.

However, in recently checking, I see the badge icons switch is toggled back on (I didn't do it) and the count has not returned. Go figure.

Now you know why I'm not THAT popular.

If this account is on another device, you may be picking up the count from there.

I know SMTP mail accounts should delete from all when deleted from one, but I have experienced deleting on my iPhone and still have it remain on my iMac.

Oops….spoke too soon. The 16,626 Inbox message count is back.


The same email address is also on my iMac but I don't have them connected in any way.

Is this a POP or IMAP account? If it is IMAP then your mac and iPhone are connected through the IMAP server. Each device sees the same identical mailboxes and messages. If it is IMAP then on your Mac try Mail > Mailboxes > Synchronize "theaccountaddress". Another, previously hidden mailbox may appear with all the messages in it.

That happened to me once with a Gmail account. I finally had to logon to the Gmail web portal and delete the messages from the previously hidden mailbox. I solved the issue permanently by changing a Gmail setting through the web interface, but for the life of me I don't remember what setting it was

It's a POP account.

POP should remove them, but in Mail, check Mail>Preferences>Accounts>Mailbox Behaviors and see if there is a setting that could be the culprit. Perhaps something related to Trash.

Without doing anything, the email count has disappeared and the only change seems to be that the Inbox contains mail, rather than being completely empty. So I guess I'll just make sure I don't dump all the Inbox mail.