4294967295 unread emails in iOs

[another_user]

First: I'm not sure if this is an iOs issue, or something with the email server itself.

I just checked my emails on my iphone (like I do about a hundred times a day) and suddenly it showed me exactly 4294967295 unread emails in one specific account. I checked it on my iPad and it also showed 4294967295 unread emails. The folder itself was empty, but since this amount of emails would take some time to download, it was not sure what's happening.

So I went on my desktop pc to see, who is sending me this many emails. Opening Thunderbird, the Inbox of this account was empty, like it should. To test it, I sent an email from another account to this one and it switched to "1 unread email" on all iOs devices.

the number is not random https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4,294,967,295

so i guess this is some kind of glitch? But what caused it? Google didn't really helped, but there are others with this issue..
 

 

[v0id]

Sign out and back in? Reinstall the email client?

 

Could be just a server bug. Are you using Microsoft Exchange by chance? Heard Exchange was having some major issues in some regions of the US (not sure where you're at), might be related.

[another_user]

In Europe, but I saw some pages mentioning this problem with MS Exchange.
It's also been mentioned as a problem after an iOS Update some years ago.
I guess something went wrong during the sync process after I read/delete the last unread email in this account. From what I'm understanding, 4294967295 is -1, so I have read one more email than there is, because the email got moved/deleted (?).
The problem itself didn't show up, after I used Thunderbird to send myself emails. Couldn't recreate the error. But I'm still wondering what exactly caused that glitch.