Spotlight

[Resist]

So I have been playing around with this feature and find it interesting that you can get old emails, even when you have deleted them from the iPhone. How does the iPhone do this?

It is kind of scary to know that anyone can pull up all my emails if they get my phone. How can we delete them for good so that Spotlight can't find them?

 

[AiralynRose]

They're probably still saved in your "Trash" folder.

 

[UnbornApple]

Its not something that the iPhone is doing.

The iPhone is connecting to your POP or IMAP server. There is most likely something still sitting in the e mail server that it is seeing.

 

[Resist]

They're probably still saved in your "Trash" folder.

My trash folder is empty.


But here is what I found out.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2044566&start=0&tstart=75

As you know, when you delete anything it is still there until it gets overwritten. That is how Spotlight finds old email. But it can only find email that was received after you setup the email account on your iPhone. So if you delete your email account on the iPhone and then set it up again, it will only find emails after the new set up. So if I did this once a week then all my old emails are really gone, plus I would be freeing up memory.

Apparently Apple knows about this issue already.