Mail search on iPhone not sorting by date

This is still happening on both iPad and iPhone 16 for me and my wife. I’ve tried all the fixes suggested and deleted and reloaded the mail app.

It is disgraceful that Apple is not working with Google to fix this. As i can see from this thread it has been going on for months.

nb it works fine on an iMac via web browser so clearly it is a mobile device iOS problem.

So I called Apple Support on this and there isn’t a fix at this time. They escalated the problem to the engineering team and a fix should hopefully be out soon. She said probably in the form of an operating system update. Fingers crossed it comes out soon.

Flipping “most recent on top” off/on worked for me too. Thanks!

If you do a search for someone where you have years of email the most recent may appear on top but if you let it sit for a bit, the emails will scramble with older email on top and the more recent ones get buried. The toggle of settings, most recent on top, does not work in this scenario.

Ever since I got my new iphone16 my emails don’t sort the way they used to.

when I search for a name or subject it defaults to the most recent which is correct. But then almost immediately it changes & goes to the oldest one first. I find myself looking at emails I sent years ago for something I actually sent a week ago. It’s a pain

I have done a bunch of searches & tried everything I can find. Obviously others are having sort issues as well.

this was not a problem till now upgraded my phone a few weeks ago.

how do I reset it so my search is the most recent emails & not the oldest?

I have been having the same problem since installing an iOS system update December 2024. I’ve spent hours on the phone with Apple, and hours in person at a genius bar.. Every tech person appears confused as though they have never heard of this before. Are they not permitted to talk about it? That makes me nervous, and why is this only happening to some people? One tech at Apple told me to wait for the new iOS system… Butbad news upon bad news is that tonight I upgraded to 18.3.2 ….. and email search/sort STILL doesn’t work! I’ve tried deleting my mail apps and reinstalling, toggling sort buttons, handing my phone and iPad to a tech so they could try. What to do now?

apple: please pull this feature back or give us the ability to turn it off. Making us live with no email for many months is completely unfair! Give us our email back please, since no one knows how to fix it. Or give us the ability to revert back to a safe version of iOS 17 please.

This is so frustrating. But when I turned the sort by recent off/on it temporarily fixed part of the problem.

the sort by subject started to sort by recent. But searching for a name did not.

Then the next day the sort by subject was again backwards. But every time I switch it off/on it temporarily works.

The problem persists; the immediate search result is in a correct timeline, but when Mail completes the search, the timeline is corrupted and apparently transforms to something that might be a timeline of latest findings.

Referring back to previous mails are an essential part of communicating and referring to a wrong mail could cause severe trouble.

This is a ridiculous and unprofessional error.

I keep hoping every time I get an upgrade the problem will stop. Nope!

it doesn’t matter if it is search by subject or by a name.

At first the sort is correct then it flips itself. Not even always older to newest. Sometimes just mixed up.

APPLE -PLEASE FIX

This is extremely frustrating.

I have multiple mailboxes and it makes searching for a specific email using a keyword really difficult. This affects greatly the effectiveness of my workflow.

The updates should normally make the system work more efficiently and not the other way around.

This has been a known problem with the apple users and I don’t understand why apple is still not reacting?

Where did you find “Summerize Message Previews” button? I’ve searched the Mail Settings but cannot find it anywhere. Can you please post a screenshot of it for those of us who are still searching for relief? Thanks.

Go to Settings>Apps>Mail

I am using iPhone 16 pro

IOS 18.3.2

[Edited by Moderator]

The latest iOS update, as well as the other suggestions made in this thread do not work if there are years worth on messages in the search results. Spoke with Apple support yet again and still no fix. If you are having this problem, call them so they recognize that many people are frustrated by this and it moves up on their priority list.