Has the Dovecot imap bug been fixed in ios 18.4?

Question

Has the Dovecot imap bug been fixed in ios 18.4?

Some background: The earlier thread on this issue, "Error in downloading mail on IMAP after ios 18 upgrade," has been inactive for two months and can no longer be posted to. More than 2,000 people indicated with the "Me too" button that they were having this problem, and there were 287 replies describing attempted fixes, all of them unsuccessful. To summarize: After the update from ios 17 to ios 18 last fall, the iPhone Mail app was no longer able to download mail from various Dovecot imap servers that had worked perfectly in the past. The problem was limited to iPhones. The macos Mail program continued to retrieve mail from the very same servers that now failed under ios 18.x. Also, while it was no longer possible to download mail (via imap), sending mail (smtp) continued to function correctly as before. There have also been discussions of this issue on the Apple Developers forum and on Github, Reddit, etc. and on a specialty Dovecot group.

Last fall I was able to revert to ios 17 so that I could continue to get Mail and have resisted updating to 18 until I hear that the bug has been fixed in 18.4. I'd appreciate any news on this matter.

Before weighing in please note that during the earlier discussion it has been established that:

1. This particular issue has nothing to do with VPN or wifi issues or with security certificates

2. It cannot be fixed by deleting and recreating the account in iPhone Settings.

3. Nor can it be fixed by fiddling with the forward slash or backslash Imap prefix in the iPhone's advanced Mail settings

4. The bug is specifically with the Apple Mail app. Imap on alternative apps like Airmail and Outlook apparently still function.

iPhone 15 Pro, iOS 17

Posted on Apr 1, 2025 8:45 PM

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Answer 1

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Top-ranking reply

GreenSage25

Level 1

8 points

Apr 3, 2025 2:41 PM in response to George Johnson

This article says it has to do with security certificates and changes to TLS

https://pcglance.com/fix-mail-app-issues-after-updating-to-ios-18/

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Answer 2

Apr 3, 2025 3:33 PM in response to GreenSage25

Thanks very much for your response. That article does describe the problem. Unfortunately all the solutions it proposes have been tried and found unsuccessful by numerous posters in the original thread (titled "Error in downloading mail on IMAP after ios 18 upgrade"). There seems to be a consensus that this is a bug with Apple Mail app. Several people have reported it. But so far there has been no notification of whether it has been acknowledged and is being fixed.

Have any of the posters on the original discussion group found that ios 18.4 has resolved the issue?

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Answer 3

Apr 9, 2025 10:36 AM in response to George Johnson

Hi, I had POSIX 96 Error problem when using IMAP login. When I removed special characters from my password it works well. So try to change your password on your email account. I used small and capital letters and Numbers only. Hope it will work for you. Apple has to have some unusual bug in email client. Problem has not been fixed yet in iOS 18.4

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Answer 4

Apr 18, 2025 9:05 AM in response to J F Takeda

Thanks for responding. The possibility that special characters in passwords was the cause of this issue was discussed and ruled out in the earlier thread I linked to. Although apparently that may have been causing the problem for one or two users, it was not a solution for the rest of us.

Asking again: can one of the many people who were posting to the previous thread ("Error in downloading mail on IMAP after ios 18 upgrade") tell me if ios 18 (now 18.1) has fixed the issue?

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Answer 5

cepal

Level 1

5 points

May 5, 2025 1:41 PM in response to George Johnson

Could you please provide the references? Your post and comments don't seem to provide much detail other than listing "what the problem is NOT about".

From my experience, my mailserver was using self-signed TLS/SSL certificate and iOS18 no longer supports that (even iOS17 was quite resistive to accept the self signed cert but there was a way, where as in iOS18 there is no way to make that work). The encryption/certificate/signing topic is quite a big one and the issue doesn't only have to be just in the self-signed certs, however self-signed or snake oil certs are a sure show-stopper. Nowadays there are several certificate authorities that provide (even with automated/incorporated renewal) signed certificates, so there's no reason the IMAP admins couldn't fix this part in no time. There could be various obsolescences on the possibly poorly maintained Dovecot IMAP servers - obsolete TLS protocols might be used, or obsolete encryption methods etc. Perhaps appropriate update/upgrade maintenance by the IMAP servers' admins could fix that - hard to tell if there's no information provided - IMAP versions, dovecot error logs, errors seen on the clients' side etc. It's very easy to cry out "has Apple fixed this yet?" whilst there's total lack of technical details on the failure and referring "many sources" but without actual reference. However, it's much less easy to follow up on that.

I had a bit of trouble downloading attachments on MacOS and found out the Privacy Setting "Protect Mail Activity" in MacOS Sequoia's Mail app was causing the troubles - I'm currently trying to find out if there's any fine tuning on Dovecot's side that could make the Apple Mail work well even with that setting on (this setting is also available on iOS!). The common issue there is that attachments seem to be stuck downloading after checking one or two e-mail messages.

Cheers.

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Answer 6

May 5, 2025 1:55 PM in response to cepal

Thanks very much for this good information. I was referring back to a lengthy thread now closed in which dozens of people documented and discussed the issue. My hope with this post was to attract the attention of some of them to see if their issue was resolved before I bit the bullet and upgraded my ios. Since none of the earlier posters have weighed in, I went ahead and upgraded and confirmed that I still can’t get email. I believe you are right and the problem is indeed the self-signed certificates.

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Has the Dovecot imap bug been fixed in ios 18.4?