mail slow to update in iOS 13

OK so right after I posted my last post it started to act up after I clicked on the bottom left icon to view unread messages only. After that m, email acted up and started to freeze. After talking to AppleCare on the phone for about an hour trying to troubleshoot they had me delete my accounts again, turn off iCloud mail, then delete the Mail application on my phone, and lastly resetting the phone by turning it off. I waited a few seconds turned the phone back on, reinstalled the Mail application, turned iCloud back on, and re-added my Gmail account. All seems to be working very smoothly at the moment. Sounds like alot but not so bad when you do it one step at a time.

I have a similar problem. Everything was going fine until I updated IOS 13. After that everything went to ****. I have had a plethora of problems with IOS 13. Between my cursor which is now possessed and won't go anywhere that I tap, and Mail that is similarly cursed, I'm about to lose my mind.

What I'm experiencing in Mail is that is it not synchronizing correctly with my Hotmail (outlook.com) email application. I have "boomeranging" emails in my junk folder; meaning when I delete them, a number of them will return to the junk folder days or weeks later. It's very random in that a few deleted junk emails will suddenly reappear in my junk folder, but only on the iPhone. The junk folder is empty on all my other devices.

I have another synchronization problem when moving emails from one folder to another using the iPhone. For example, if I move 200 emails from one folder to another, the iPhone will move them correctly, but then it will show 75 "ghost" emails in the original folder that they were moved from. The 75 ghost emails are also properly located in the folder that I moved them to, they just also appear in the folder that I moved them from, so they are in two places at once according to the iPhone.

The ghost emails will not go away. They will sit there for weeks on end in the original folder until I decide that I can't take it anymore and I select them all and delete them. Once I do that the folder remains empty, and the original 75 emails remain in their proper place in the other folder.

The problem is clearly with IOS 13, because I never had this problem before I updated to IOS 13, and my email application synchronizes perfectly in Mail on all my other devices (iMac desktop computer and MacBook). I also have the Outlook.com app on my iPhone which synchronizes 100% properly. My email works correctly everywhere, except on my iPhone’s Mail app.

I reported these issues to Apple a number of times and have done every update since then but the problem still persists. When it first started happening I deleted my email account from the phone's Mail app and added it back in. It worked fine for a little while until the boomeranging emails started all over again. It's never the same emails that boomerang back to the junk folder. It could be half a dozen junk emails that reappear from the last couple of days or it could be 30 junk emails from the last 30 days. It's totally random.

The next thing I tried was to delete the Mail app altogether from the phone and add it back from the App store. After doing that I added my email account to the new Mail app, but unfortunately that made no difference. The exact same problems with synchronization occurred again over time. Before doing the last update to 13.3.1, I deleted my email account from the Mail app, and tethered my phone to my desktop computer and did the update that way, just in case there was a Wi-Fi glitch that was causing hiccups with the prior updates. After that I added my email account back to the Mail app, but it didn't help. The same problems reoccurred.

Unfortunately, Apple will not escalate my support ticket to the engineering department unless I first agree to restore my phone from a current backup and start over. Admittedly they said it's going to take me several days to get my phone back to the way it was after I do a restore. I said why should I have to do that when the problem is with iOS 13? I am tired of having to go through repeated time-consuming diagnostics on my own and with Apple senior support only to end up being told that there's nothing they can do to escalate the ticket unless I first agree to blow up my phone and start over. No thanks! I will wait till iOS 14 comes out and hope that these problems are resolved.

It's clear from the number of reports in the Apple support community that I am not alone in my horrific experiences with IOS 13. And don't even get me started with my possessed cursor. Chasing it around endlessly like my iPhone is a pinball game is the least of my problems.

Well, I ended up deleting all of my email accounts under “Passwords and Accounts” and turned off iCloud. Then I turned off my phone to reset it. Went back into settings and turned on iCloud then re-added my email accounts. That seems to have fixed my problem, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it stays that way.

I was having this same issue (I’m on an iPhone X, in case that matters). Here’s what I did and it worked:

1) Reset your Network Setting (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings). It will take a minute to reset and then come back.

2) Force quit the Mail app by either hitting the Home button twice or slow swipe up (on phones without a home button) and then swipe up in the Mail app.

I seem to be getting emails updated immediately now. Hopefully this helps.

I was having the very same problem. I awoke to the availability of iOS 13.3 and the release notes claimed a fix to these kinds of problems was included. I installed it immediately and it seems to have resolve the issue.

Followup: I did more research on the internet and nothing helped. I removed all my email accounts (several times!!!), removed mail app itself, tried all combinations of push/fetch/background refresh but nothing helped. My iphone mail worked for 5 to 10 minutes after restart, than it stopped receiving or sending emails (stuck in checking new mail) and drained my battery in less than an hour and turning my iphone into a "hand/pocket warmer". Nothing I tried helped, and I've tried everything... yes, everything. Local genius bar had no clue either. So I decided to try one more thing before I ditch my iphone. I've backuped my iphone to my mac, reset it to factory defaults a few times and reinstalled ios using my mac (finder method, macos catalina way). After restoring back from backup my mail seems to work (for now)... it is still a bit sluggish, and on a few occasions I still get the new email sound and new mail icon but after opening mail app I have to wait for email to be displayed (or check manually), but at least I can send/receive email from my phone without reseting it repeatedly. Battery lasts me almost a full day now. Before I had to charge it every three to four hours (!!) and carry powerbank or two with me all the time. Definitely a huge improvement, but still not as good as it was in IOS 12 or 11. Hope this helps someone .... one more thing: after reset you may need a few charge cycles to recalibrate your battery, don't get alarmed about that sudden drops to 1% battery remaining. Battery reporting improves with every charge.

Settings > Passwords & Accounts settings > Fetch New Data settings.

It seems that "Automatical" fetch is buggy. Set it to 15min repeat, should be fine for most use cases.

One thing I noticed is that since iOS 13, mail background activity disappeared entirely (went to zero) in the battery settings. This changed yesterday when I added some vibration notifications to email accounts. Hypothetically this behavior could be an optimization where knowing that all other forms of notifications other than sound require the user to wake up the phone in order to see them, that it doesn't perform the background work at the expense of a delay in seeing the email when you do pick up the phone and check. It could also be a straight up bug where adding sound notification clears up an underlying data issue that affects background mail processing. I had previously had no sound or vibration notifications for any email accounts as it is super annoying due to volume of email. This morning when I woke up, mail showed background activity for the first time since updating to iOS 13.

FYI, everyone:

A. I have spoken with Apple Tech Support about these issues. They are aware of them and hope to fix Mail soon.

B. There are two stop-gap solutions:

1. Most (or everyone?) with this problem are experiencing unusable Mail when going to All Inboxes. If you choose just one e-mail account Inbox at a time, the Mail app works perfectly well, or close to it.

2. Use Outlook, which is a fantastic e-mail app. :)

Slow update of new email in iOS13.2.3 persists for my iPhoneX but I have simple quick work-around that allows me to immediately read all delivered email.

When the unread email count increments but no new unread messages appear in the message list, I touch the "Filtered" icon at lower left to show only unread messages. All unread messages, including those just received, are immediately displayed. If I press the Filter icon again to remove all filters, the new messages remain displayed in the complete email list.

I hope that; 1) this works for other users, and 2) it provides a hint to Apple on how to fix the problem.

I tried it a few days ago and it was working for me since. I also saw that there is a new iOS update available today that specifically addresses the Mail app, it says it should improve background downloading. Hopefully that’s the fix that works for you.

Hi!

First, try re-configuring your mail boxes. Maybe there's some authentication issues are going on.

Second, try re-configuring the fetch method.

Here's how:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201419

You also can walk trough entire article, other things might help to.

Let me know it changed anything for you.

Another couple of hints I am seeing...

1. When I see badge notifications and open email, it takes +/- 10 seconds for the new messages to appear when I open iOS mail. If I click on the filter button at the bottom left side of the screen, the messages appear instantly. Navigating back to the unfiltered view provides visibility to all messages including the new unread messages...
2. I was on an airplane last week and checked my phone for mail after we took off and I had already initiated airplane mode. Again, the badge icon indicated I had 3 unread messages. When I opened the iOS mail app there were no new messages. I then clicked on the filter button and poof... 3 new readable messages. When I clicked on the filter button again, I returned to my full list of messages including the new unread email messages.

There is clearly something amiss somewhere between iOS and the mail app. The messages are clearly downloading without issue as they were present and available even in airplane mode but not visible in the app until I applied the filter. One test that would have been interesting would have been to see if the messages appeared if I waited the requisite 10 seconds without applying the filter button... I will try to remember that next time I am flying.

i have found a solution that works for me.

my email is collected from a pop3 server in which i had a very large deleted email folder.

i cleared out the deleted email and switched ios mail to store deleted mail

on my phone and ios mail is now quick and no longer a battery hog.

maybe it will work for you?

-Steve