Mail search on iPhone not sorting by date

Ridiculous that this has not been fixed as it renders Mail as being completely unreliable for anything important. I haven’t looked yet but how hard would it be to move old messages into another email program like Outlook?

This did not work for me, BUT, when I also clicked on organize by thread that worked. Who knows why?

I THINK this might have just gotten fixed….updated to 18.4 and at least the first few searches now seem to work correctly. Hoping im right, and thanks to whatever engineer helped out!

OMG, the latest iOS update might have changed something and I have found a way to get things sorted. When you do a search for emails where there are years of them, you now get an initial result that has a disclaimer at the bottom saying that “Some results may not appear. Mail downloads and organizes messages when iPad is locked, charging and connected to WiFi. Large accounts like this may take longer.” The search result pulls more old emails and they appear in different order as more are found, putting the newest lower in the result, as before, and you can’t find what you are looking for. BUT if you give it a bit of time and then change the search at the top from “From” to “To” and then back again to “From” the messages now appear in order from newest to oldest! The number of messages that you have from the sender is why people have said that different things work in the past - They must have been searching accounts that are smaller. I’ve tried this toggling now a few times and it has worked every time!

This problem persists and Apple does nothing. I clear my email of junk by searching things like "sale". But using a search term no longer works because the results show older emails, which I am saving, first and the ones I need to delete are buried

Hi, same issue. Mail accounts are Office365 hosted, multiple domain names. Devices are iPhone 16 Pro's with iOS 18.4, 18.4.1, 18.5 .

When searching iOS Mail app , results first appear in order but then follow up with more results mixed into the results, and out of order.

None of the “fixes” posted here worked for me. After 6 months of racing to find my search results before the older results from over 10 years ago replaced them; I got tired of waiting for Apple to fix this problem. I installed the “Gmail” app on my iPhone and the search results were correct with that app, so I removed my Gmail account from my Apple Mail app and selected Gmail as my default email client from my Apple Mail accounts. (We will see if this causes new headaches)

Please note: I thought many of the “fixes” in this thread worked, at first. However, my huge 15GB Gmail account would eventually revert back to this behavior if I waited a while.

Well, apparently I can’t edit my post. So let me warn you not to delete your Apple Mail account for Gmail. I had to restore my Gmail account in Apple mail to get all my contacts back! After I did that I rechecked to search mail function in Apple Mail, and it still is broken even afterward. But my Gmail app is working fine for searching emails, so I just use that client whenever I want to search for an email.

Update: I checked the Apple Mail search function two days later and now it is working; so perhaps they just fixed it?

I don’t have a fix, but seem to have found an improvement.

1. In Mail, view any or all mailboxes.
2. Tap the “…” menu (at upper-right of screen).
3. Disable “Show Contact Photos”.
4. Search for something.

After doing the above, my search results improved. Unfortunately, I still don’t get consistent results:

• Most often (thankfully), search results appear in the expected, proper date order.
• Sometimes, search results appear with one or just a few old emails at the top of an otherwise properly sorted list.
• Rarely, search results appear as before, with most-recent results appearing far down the list, if at all.

You may experience other outcomes.

Workaround 1: Sometimes, when searching a single mailbox, tapping “All Mailboxes” then “Current Mailbox” yields a correct sort.

Workaround 2: Sometimes, when searching all mailboxes, tapping “Current mailbox” then “All Mailboxes” yields a correct sort.

Workaround 3: Sometimes, searching for a different term, then repeating the desired search yields a correct sort.

Workaround 4: Sometimes, closing search then repeating the search yields a correct sort.

I have not found a workaround that always works. I have an iPhone Pro Max running iOS 18.5.

When I toggled the “Most recent on top” button, closes the app, reopened and tried the search again, it worked. Try toggling the button even if it’s already on green. Hope it works.

I toggled ‘most recent message on top’ to off and back to on and it fixed it immediately . Had been unusable for weeks. Thanks to whoever suggested this

After struggling with this for months, I found a possible fix. After trying all the fixes in the replies, what worked for me was going to Settings for the Mail app and turning OFF the Summarize Message Previews option. My search results are now in date order.

I posted earlier, after the older results pop up and mix up the order, toggle the search from “from” to “to” and then back again and the results will come up in order newest to oldest.

This is also happening to me and selecting “most recent messages on top” didn’t work. Everything showing up from this week is at the very bottom but things that have dates in list view are showing up chronologically. It’s almost like it’s recognizing the days of the week (sent in the past week) as received longest ago, like it’s not looking at the date or year it was sent, if sent in the past week. Would love a fix for this. Email is already overwhelming. Now search doesn’t work.

This does not fix the problem for me either. I have An Apple iphone 16 Pro Max. Using the Mail App. Threaded is turned off. Collapse Read Message is on. Most Recent Message on Top is on. Complete Threads is off. This is unusable in this state.