Mail is very slow downloading in iOS 18

Same problem here on IPad Air 5th gen. Must have coincided with the update to 18.2. Emails are received but the content takes forever to download. Same problem with exchange and pop accounts so not a fault with Microsoft.

If the iPad were my only device this would be devastating!

—UPDATE—

Disabled “Protect mail Activity” and “Hide IP Address” in “apps” -> “Mail” -> “Privacy Protection” as suggested by one of the other users. Immediate fix. The Germans have a word for that; Verschlimmbessert .. fixed initial problem by adding another problem .. Kinda wanted that privacy that Apple is so big on.. Guess not yet

Ok. So what has solved it for me is turning off Sky Broadband shield. Not happy about doing so, but it has now allowed emails to arrive quickly into Apple mail. Why other apps like Edison or Outlook work without issue with Sky broadband shield I don’t know.

Yep - same problem! Mine hit after the leap to 18.2 on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. None of the suggestions in here worked. It takes 20-60 mins to get a new message in the app - icloud, MS exchange, and gmail! I ultimately had to download the ridiculous gmail and microsoft mail apps to avoid missing critical business emails! This apple is starting to become rotten to the core!

I don’t use my phone in a corporate setting, but did find that switching of Sky broadbands shield fixed my Apple mail issue. It’s not ideal as the droid users at home never had a problem with the shield up.

I am having the slow email loading problem since upgrading to 18.2.1 but I cannot find your setting to change to try to fix the problem. I navigated the settings using your suggested path but (on my Apple iPad) NO “Account Settings > Advanced > IMAP Path Prefix” is displayed on my iPadOS 18.2.1 .

I too am experiencing this problem of very SLOW loading of e-mails while using the Apple “Mail” app. This significantly slower loading seems to have started with my recent update to iOS/iPadOS 18.2.1.

Since November, 2024, both our iPads and our two iPhones (SE & X) have experienced VERY slow downloads of emails, sometimes after fast loading of the author's name but then very slow downloading even one line of text! I've time some at 2 1/2 minutes. Prior to November even emails with a reasonably large attachment would download in a few seconds on a 400mbps connection. Has any solution been announced?

Shockingly slow mail

app. Takes forever to

download mail. I have given up now & use Gmail app directly. It instantly downloads my mail. This has happened only since IOS update 18.2 . I’m using iphone16

Thanks. Disabling “protect Mail actovity/ hide IP addresss” seems to have worked for me, but I gotta say that disabling security features to make services useable/ functional seems to be a hallmark of Apple these days.

I found by going into settings/apps/mail/mailaccounts/fetch new data/ I get a list of all the things it fetches. Turns out fetch was set for two calendars which I’ve kept but are no longer in use. There’s nothing active on them. I turned them from fetch to manual. And everything seems to be fine now.

So maybe review your fetch settings in my accounts.

It’s unclear to me why 18.3.2 would surface this problem. Though in the past, I have had instances where mail would not load and I’d have to force close the mail app and clear the cache. But this was happening in a work account. It was unacceptable.

I use Comcast and am still struggling. If you, or anyone else, has ideas for how to "re-accelerate" Apple Mail for a Comcast email account, I'd appreciate them. Otherwise, I'll probably have to go to Outlook mail.

Same here. Apple said the same to me “nobody else has this problem”. I deleted my Mail account then reinstalled it and it fixed the problem for a couple of months. Now it’s bad again.

Apple really needs to fix this issue. The other thing that has happened is my business partners emails are now going to my spam folder. I changed nothing. I’ve spoken to techs for 3 days but nobody can fix the issue. It’s frustrating.

The one by Moriarty91 that I responded to, to whitelist the icloud.com Domains in PiHole.

This worked for me. Thanks eheffa!