Deleting emails where I am BCC'd from the inbox

I have this same issue, and it started very recently, and it is incredibly frustrating. It is definitely a problem with the native Apple mail app. Apple needs to address this issue ASAP. I know several of my colleagues having the same issue.

Having not seen this post earlier, I posted separately about the same thing ("Mail, iOS 16: Deleting the Bcc also deletes the Sent message").

Summary: I always Bcc myself when I send a message to verify that it went out (because Apple Mail used to silently suppress outgoing messages it thought might be spam). After I receive the Bcc, I delete it. If I delete the Bcc from my received mail using iOS 16, then the original SENT message is also deleted!

This trouble is easy to test: (1) enable "Always Bcc Myself" on a device running iOS 16, (2) send an email, and (3) delete the Bcc message received on that iOS 16 device. The Bcc and the Sent messages are both deleted.  This makes the "Always Bcc Myself" setting useless because deleting the Bcc also deletes the Sent message, leaving no record of the message being sent.

I've submitted Apple Feedback (FB11746292, Nov 2, 2022), so please do the same. Apple claims nobody else has reported this.

Hey there carleen70,

Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities. We're happy to provide some assistance.

Was anything updated or changed when this started occurring? Also, does this occur if you go to the mail provider's website using a browser? This can help us isolate the issue.

If this does occur on the mail provider's website, we do recommend contacting them to investigate this.

Keep us posted.

Have a great day!

I’ve just tried this on an iPad and deleting from Inbox deletes from Sent as well.

So issue occurs with Exchange, gmail and my Mail provider (which is not either of those two)

edit: tried on MacOS 10.14.6 with gmail account and gmail web and issue still occurs.

I found this from a few years ago:

Gmail doesn't have folders. All your messages are saved in All Mail. Everything else (Inbox, Starred, Drafts, user-labels, etc) are just "views" into a subset of the messages in All Mail. And since there's only one copy of any message, if you delete it from any label, you're deleting the only copy, so it's gone from all of them.

Seems other email systems have the same behaviour.

Hi Rob_H1,

I am experiencing exactly the same issue. I am using Microsoft 365 as my email provider. I have tested by sending an email using Outlook 365 PC client on my laptop, BCC'ing myself when sending this email. I then view the copy that i received, on my iPhone 14 (iOS 16.3) using the native Mail app. When i delete the copy email from my inbox on the iPhone, the copy in my sent items is also deleted. This does not happen if i use the Outlook App on my iPhone to review and delete the email copy.

The issue definitely lies with the iPhone native Mail App. This has only started happening in the last few months so i'm wondering if it relates to an Apple update to the iPhone App.

Any ideas how we can disable this feature?

Thanks

This makes no difference for me. If i BCC or CC myself and then delete the copy from my inbox using Mail app it automatically deletes the Sent Item too. I can find both instances in my Deleted Items folder.

If i delete using the Outlook App it does not do this. There is definitely a bug (or it could be by design) in the native Mail App on iPhone, and its only started since updating to IOS16.

Jeffrey Mattox wrote:

Summary: I always Bcc myself when I send a message to verify that it went out (because Apple Mail used to silently suppress outgoing messages it thought might be spam).

Now I understand why!

I have been having the same issue with my phone for at least a month.

I also had an issue during the same window of time where my emails were not always sending. I’d hit send, get a whoosh, then nothing.

no sent email. No draft. Just gone.