How to Move Email from Junk to Mail Inbox on iPhone & iPad
Do you want to move the emails located in the Junk folder back to the Inbox within the Mail app on iPhone or iPad? If so, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s fairly simple to unmark emails as junk / spam and restore them back to their original location, or even their rightful location. By doing this, you’re telling the Mail app that the email is not junk.
Apple’s stock Mail app makes use of the Junk folder to store all the spam e-mails that you may have received, but as we all know sometimes spam filters are overly aggressive and can wrongfully place proper emails into the spam filter and therefore end up in the Junk folder. Furthermore, once you move an email from your inbox to the Junk folder, all the future emails from the sender will be automatically moved to the same folder. Therefore, if you want to unmark any of these emails as spam, you’ll have to move them back from the Junk folder. For some senders that keep ending up in the Junk folder, you may have to check and move the emails back to the regular inbox routinely, particularly with some email services which seem to aggressively mark non-spam items as spam / junk.
Interested in learning the procedure so you can try it out for yourself on your iPhone and iPad? We’ll be discussing how you can move email from Junk to Mail inbox on both the iPhone and iPad.
How to Move Email from Junk to Mail Inbox on iPhone & iPad
Before you go ahead with the procedure, you need to make sure that you’ve added an email account to the Mail app before. That may be somewhat obvious, but not all users rely on the Mail app for emails. Assuming you’ve done that, simply follow the steps below to unmark emails as spam by moving them from the Junk folder back to Inbox.
- Open the stock “Mail” app from the home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
- In the Mailboxes section, simply choose the “Junk” folder as shown in the screenshot below.
- Here, tap “Edit” located at the top-right corner of the screen.
- Now, you’ll be able to individually select all the emails by tapping them. Once you’re done with the selection, choose “Mark” at the bottom-left corner of the screen. (note that some email accounts differ, and instead you’ll choose “Move”)
- Now, simply tap “Mark as Not Junk”, in order to unmark these emails as spam and move them back to the Inbox. (or, for the alternate email accounts, choose to “move” the email to the Inbox and out of Junk)
And now you know exactly how to move the emails that are stored in the Junk folder back to the Mail inbox on iPad or iPhone
As you can see here, this is a fairly simple and straightforward procedure. The Junk folder within the Mail app is just the same as the Spam folder you’re used to seeing in other popular e-mail services. By moving these emails back to the Inbox, you’re essentially also allowing the respective senders to send you any emails in the future (usually anyway, but that can depend on email provider and their spam filters).
The Mail app can easily determine the spam folder from various email service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Aol and more. Therefore, regardless of what service you’re using, you can fully rely on this Junk folder to keep your spam emails organized, but don’t be surprised if occasionally something important ends up wrongfully listed in there which is why you’d probably want to move something from Junk back to the regular Inbox anyway.
As mentioned before, some email providers are overly aggressive and can mark legitimate items as spam and therefore those emails end up in the iPhone or iPad Junk folders, so it can be a good idea to periodically check the Junk folders of your email inboxes to make sure you’re not missing out on any important emails, newsletters, receipts, and other stuff that can erroneously be flagged as junk/spam.
Do you use Apple’s Mail app that came pre-installed on your Mac? If so, you’ll be pleased to know that you could move your Junk emails back to the Inbox on your macOS machine as well, in a similar way.
Note that you can also recover deleted emails in a procedure that should be familiar to you if you’ve moved emails around the Mail app before too.
Did you manage to successfully unmark emails as spam on your iPhone by moving them back to the Inbox from the Junk folder? How do you feel about the way Apple’s Mail app handles your email accounts? Do let us know your thoughts, experiences, and opinions in the comments section down below.
Using exchange in the Mail app does not have a mark as not junk, and the whole app froze when I marked the messages to move to inbox. It took me almost an hour to fix everything. It finally worked, but it was more than a pain.
Thanks for the tips. All sounded good except when I hit mark as not junk they disappeared from the junk mailbox but i couldnt find them in the Inbox??
Have iPhone 11 Pro. “Mark as not Junk” is not an option as you show. Even when in Junk colder, the only Junk related option is “Move to Junk”
About 20% of the email I get (sometimes over 150 a day) goes to junk.
I do exactly as you said to move some that were labeled Junk to the Inbox. Then I go through my inbox to find those not identified as Junk to move into my junk. I can then move them all to trash.
I still need to check every email. I go into Junk, then In then Junk then back to In. The AI does not learn. I add email addresses to my Address Book and it will still send them to junk.
Since it’s an Outlook Account, I sometimes go there and make the corrections and then come back to mail. I might as well stop using Mail and use Outlook. Or turn of fthe spam feature. I still have to examine each, but IO onoy need to check one folder and sent them directly to Trash.
What am I missing here?
For what it’s worth, I have the same experience with Outlook. I think it is on their server side (Outlooks) rather than on the Mail app side, because I too am constantly flagging emails as “not junk” and every week new emails from the same senders end up back there anyway. This is frustrating and seems specific to Outlook, as I do not have the same experience on Gmail or iCloud, so I think Outlook has overly zealous spam filters. It’s possible to be able to correct it by using Outlook.com on the web for a while, but I have not tried that approach yet. For now I just check my Outlook “Junk” folder twice a week and move real emails out of there every time.
I don’t see “Mark as Not Junk”.
I do however see “Move to Junk”.
Why is this?
I simply click on the email and move it to inbox.
Why don’t I see the “Mark as Not Junk” as per your instructions (I am using the latest IOS version.
Thanks
I also just move the emails to the inbox, but it seems to depend on how the inbox is setup as the verbiage can be slightly different. The end result is the same; moving the email from junk to primary mail inbox.
The most frustrating thing to me about this is that it does not seem to learn, I find myself moving the same emails from the same sender to inbox constantly.
Where you indicated to select ‘Mark’ I had to select ‘Move’ instead to move the piece of junk mail to ‘Inbox’. Selecting ‘Mark’ did not have the selection “Mark as Not Junk”. I am using an iPhone 6SPlus with IOS 13.3.1. I guess different versions work differently.
You didn’t specify which version of iPhone or which version of IOS was used for the moving of e-Mail on the iPhone.
I know know nothing about iPads so can’t speak for them.