I have an iPhone that is configured for Activesync and has been working fine. Over the weekend I was completely offline and while my iPhone was not connected to the internet I deleted around 450 email messages from the iPhone inbox. Around 18 hours later I was back in cell phone range, the iPhone synchronized my new email messages, all looked good.
Then a few hours later I launched Outlook and found all the messages I had deleted on the iPhone were still present in Outlook. I logged into OWA and confirmed the messages were still showing there too so the Exchange server has not been updated with the changes I made on the phone.
Now my iPhone is happily receiving new messages and if I delete these from the iPhone they are deleted in Outlook as expected. However, my Outlook Inbox is still showing the 450ish messages I deleted. These messages have not synchronized back to the iPhone.
I want my Inbox as it currently appears on the phone, not as it currently appears in Outlook.
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How do I resolve this apparent sync conflict and just make my iphone 'win' so that it updates the Exchange server?
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Why did being offline for around 18 hours while deleting messages on the iphone cause this to happen?
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Best Answer
Well I ended up solving this problem with a slightly lateral solution. Despite the fact that the iPhone was not updating the changes I made while I was offline, it was synchronizing all new changes just fine. Given I wanted to maintain the inbox on the iphone, I just created a sub-folder under the inbox and moved all my messages there (on the phone), that change was successfully sync'd to Outlook and then I just deleted all the messages from the inbox on Outlook (Inbox represented the 450 messages I had deleted on the iphone while offline) and then moved the messages from the temporary sub-folder back into the inbox. Everything continues to sync correctly.
Obviously this is not a technical solution as I had only 75 messages on the iphone inbox that I wanted to maintain it was an easy fix. If anyone knows how you might better deal with this scenario when there are thousands of messages in play I'd be curious to know!