Refreshing email folders on the iPhone/Touch

If you have an email profile on your iPhone or iPod Touch talking to Exchange, your email folders might not synchronise correctly after you make changes. New folders seem to come through fine, but deleted or moved folders don’t seem to automatically refresh.

You’d think that deleting the email profile and recreating it (as a last resort) would sort out the issue, but it doesn’t.

In order to get your revised folder structure in the Mail Profile, follow these steps:

• From the main screen, go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts/ Calendars
• Select the account you want updated
• Turn off Mail synchronisation
• Go back to the main screen and run the Mail application, going into the mail account (there shouldn’t be anything here at this point)
• Go back to the main screen, go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts/ Calendars
• Select the account you want updated
• Turn on Mail synchronisation
• Go back to the Mail application and refresh – the updated folders should then be there

I hope this helps someone, as I had to search the web and experiment to get this working. Based on the evidence, it suggests that deleting a profile doesn’t actually remove the cached information from the device, so if you recreate the profile it stills picks up the information retained on the iPod Touch.