Mail not working on iPhone after iOS 18 Update

nxnw wrote:

Lucky you that the bug has not impacted you, but it has caused a lot of trouble for a whole lot of people.

It doesn't affect most people. That doesn't mean that it's not awful when it affects you. And that's why I gave the contact information for Apple, so that, if you are one of the unfortunates, you can get help.

The person to whom I was responding was specifically asking for Apple to address the matter.

Sorry but I have to laugh when people think that saying the problem is not happening for “most people” is the same as fixing a problem. How is that at all useful is beyond me. Clearly this version of mail has significant problems or there would not be a thread that has continued for months. What I am suggesting is that only Apple knows what they did to mail in IOS 18. Therefore it’s up to them to work with ISP to resolve whatever is wrong. One suggestion is that if they are using some aspect of SNMP/IMAP protocol that did not use in IOS 17 they could provide an option to fall back to how IOS 17 worked while they work out the incompatibility. It could very well be an ISP server issue.

as far as my mail client goes, some days it works fine. Other days it’s unusable.

rjsqxxx wrote:

Sorry but I have to laugh when people think that saying the problem is not happening for “most people” is the same as fixing a problem. How is that at all useful is beyond me.

It's useful because it informs how you troubleshoot things. If a problem affects everyone or even a majority, it makes sense to consider that it's a bug. If it affects only a small number, it may be far more productive to figure out things you can do yourself or to contact Apple. Assuming that it's "the upgrade" tends to result in people saying they are going to wait for an upgrade to fix it and being very unhappy that they have to live with a problem.

Clearly this version of mail has significant problems or there would not be a thread that has continued for months.

There are threads that have continued for months about lots of things that aren't major problems if by major, you mean affecting a lot of people. For the people who are affected by this problem, it's major regardless of how many people are affected.

What I am suggesting is that only Apple knows what they did to mail in IOS 18. Therefore it’s up to them to work with ISP to resolve whatever is wrong. One suggestion is that if they are using some aspect of SNMP/IMAP protocol that did not use in IOS 17 they could provide an option to fall back to how IOS 17 worked while they work out the incompatibility. It could very well be an ISP server issue.

All you have is speculation. But, if you want to sit around being angry and waiting for some possible future upgrade to fix things, by all means, do that.

I deleted my email account that is not working from my iPhone 14, did a shutdown/restart, updated to iOS 18.2.1, re-added the email account to the mail app... and it still will not download mail. When will this get fixed? Is there any work around to get this to work? I've tried SSL/no SSL, I added the "/" to the IMAP Path Prefix. Nothing is working! This is very disappointing to say the least. Let's go Apple!! Fix this bug!!

Here's an odd thing. Draw your own conclusions.

There was a related discussion that didn't have a great signal to noise ratio, but still had a lot of useful information. It was observed to have been closed on January 5, 2025. This is what it says up top:

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Guess what the date of the last message was? January 4, 2025.

In fact, there were multiple messages each prior day in January, including an active discussion among several using dovecot as IMAP server, who were discussing and implementing an effective workaround.

First off how does anyone assume they know that it’s a small number of users with a problem. My experience with this sort of thing is that only a small number of people will post on the blog that they have a problem because they don’t want to deal with people bullying them. I am not bullied!

Thrre is definitely a serious problem with the iios 18 mail client. Some users can not get mail at all. Others like myself experience severe performance degradation.

asking us to find a fix for ourselves is clearly not working. I would think Apple would monitor these forums and get the message that mail is not working right for everyone.

my ISP is a common one … Comcast. If mail is working poorly with a large isp like Comcast it’s secretly should be addressed.

Yes. This is the sort of thing that is useful. If there are users with access to email servers who can trace the problem that could get to the root cause of the issue.

i can not do anything in that regard. I am a retired IT operating systems engineer but no longer have access to an email servers. I certainly am not setting up one at home.

the problem needs to be debugged. Continuing to say things like only a small number of users is effected is likely both untrue and not helpful.

thank you the reply. I noticed it slowly getting better. I suspect that sometimes I may hit an email server that still has a problem with what iOS 18 mail is doing. Who knows how May actual Comcast email servers are out there. I am sure it’s not just one. Apple could help by being more transparent about the problem. They really should have came up with an option to turn off asynchronous IMAP requests (pipelining) as that sort of thing is notoriously tricky to code if you ever did any network programming.

I agree with rjsqxxx that this issue appears to be improving. It caused havoc for my wife's email when she upgraded to a new iPhone on which iOS18 was obligatory. Our third party email archive disappeared as did the archive on her phone and iPad, but not her Mac from which I was able to recover about 4 years of emails via the export utility. Apple's initial support was unhelpful and wasted three 90 minute support calls, one at the Guru Bar which is another 90 minute round trip. Anyway, and for whatever reason(s), her email now appears stable and my reticence about upgrading to 18.2.1 is slowly waning. - unless I see a flurry of fresh problems.

Hello

I can confirm that not only does the iOS 18.3 update not fix the issue, but as far as I'm concerned it's worse than iOS 18.2. Until then, I felt relatively spared from total disaster with synchronization in reception and not in transmission. Since the iOS 18.3 update, there's been no synchronization and no message reception. It's a catastrophe!

Still not fixed in 18.3 release.

iPad fails to connect to mail cache on internal network using IP address (external network using domain name as in cert is fine).

Phone is fine, still running on 17 and will not be upgrading until this is fixed.

“Basically, whatever Apple changed in Mail from iOS 17 to iOS 18, it's causing Zimbra/Postfix to generate egregiously long list of conditions for IMAP queries on the back-end, causing accounts to lockup for minutes if not hours while the query is running”

Postfix is an SMTP server and has nothing to do with IMAP

For me, so far the 18.3 update appears to have fixed my IMAP problem with Apple Mail. All mail folder contents and attachments are now fetched right away instead of locking up for some considerable time, as was the case previously. I did the update to 18.3 but did not open Mail for several hours, to find it working fine. So far.

I use a Dovecot IMAP server on my NAS, Mail accesses it via LAN IP address via a non-secure connection, if that makes any difference.

Update: After restarting my phone after the iOS 18.3 update my email is being pushed to my phone in the 15 min increments however there is no ping sound, just banner notifications. I did check the sounds and everything is on as it should be. Any suggestions??

It looks like everybody is just swinging in the dark and replying with anything that pops up in their head while they’re trying to sober up let’s read what’s been tried not keep sending all these repeat emails