SEPTEMBER 2020 MACWORLD 51one, you could stop using Mail and try a
different app. Or you could turn off Push
notifications. That will give the Mail app
time to properly fetch and sort messages
on its own schedule, which should
eliminate the unread badge. You could
also clear out any rules in Mail on your
Mac, which would completely solve the
problem but kind of defeat the purpose of
having rules in the first place.
If It persists after trying those things,
your account is likely attached to another
service that’s filtering and triaging your
messages even if you don’t use it
anymore. In my case, it’s Newton, which
automatically filters newsletters and social
media messages into specific folders.
When I turn them off, the phantom unread
badge is no longer an issue.
Someday the iOS mail app will support
rules and this won’t be an issue. But until
then, it’s an issue with solutions that aren’t
ideal. ■sorting and organizing
for your inbox (go.
macworld.com/ogin).
You can have
messages
automatically move,
redirect, forward, or
flag based on the
sender, subject, or
contents, and it’s very
useful for keeping
clutter out of your inbox. However, since
Mail Rules can only be created on the
Mac, the iOS app struggles a bit and that’s
where the trouble comes in.
Rules are applied after an email comes
in, so messages still go into your inbox
before they are sorted. On the Mac, it’s an
instantaneous process that is basically
invisible, but on an iOS device, you can
see it working. Emails come in and then
get sorted, so they appear in the inbox as
unread messages before they reach their
final destination. The badge is supposed
to disappear after it’s sorted, but it doesn’t
always work that way. Sometimes it’ll stick
around in the inbox too long, other times
I’ll open it before it reaches the right folder,
and often it just gets tricked into thinking
there’s an unread email in the inbox when
the message in question has actually
already been moved to a different folder.
There are a few ways to counteract
this, but none of them are really ideal. For
Turning off Notifications should remove the unread badge.