Back in July, iPhone user, Ted Landau had discovered a mystery bug in iPhone's Mail app after upgrading to iPhone OS 3.0.

He reported that when he used the new Spotlight feature, which was introduced in iPhone OS 3.0, he discovered emails that he had deleted long time back. He observed that tapping on any of these emails displayed their content, as if the email was not deleted. 

Landau was not the only one who had observed this issue. One user by the name of Matt Janssen even published a YouTube video of the bug.

As you can see from the YouTube video below, tapping on the deleted email launches the Mail app but crashes immediately, which is slightly different from Landau's observation.

Landau believes that the emails were not getting deleted from the iPhone from the beginning and the new Spotlight feature which brought Universal search to the iPhone only exposed the bug.

It is a little unnerving to see emails that you had thought were deleted, are still accessible. At that time, Landau had mentioned that Apple was aware of the bug and plans to fix it iPhone OS 3.1.

Folks at WhenWillApple have confirmed that the issue seems to be fixed in iPhone OS 3.1 as they have tried to replicate the bug on an iPhone running the latest beta version of iPhone OS 3.1 with both POP3 and IMAP accounts and were not able to reproduce the bug. They have also published a video to show that the deleted emails are no longer displayed in Spotlight in iPhone OS 3.1:

That's good but our reader, lukas has raised a very good question:

"the question still stands, if the e-mails in 3.1 are really deleted or if just spotlight doesn't show them…"

As always, please let us know your thoughts on this bug in the comments section below.

[via Engadget]