I have the latest ios 13.1.3 and the apple mail app has major issues, has anyone else had problems? I have the latest ios 13.1.3 and the apple mail app has major issues, has anyone else had problems?

I have the latest ios 13.1.3 and the apple mail app has major issues, has anyone else had problems? I mainly use MS Outlook in the apple Mail App (NOT the MSOutlook App - it keeps all my emails in one place) There is a broken run of emails (ie dates missing), it’s deleted all my draft emails and is hit and miss when I want to find an email from my history - I mirror the email app on my Iphone (8+) and IPad Pro (both run latest IOS). When I try to find an email from history, both Devices turn up different results - sometimes non of them are accurate. There appears to be bugs in the app?

Posted on Oct 16, 2019 12:37 AM

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Posted on Nov 5, 2019 7:37 AM

I hope this is helpful: First, following Apple's advice I restored my entire iPhone which is a big pain, and forced me to pay for more iCloud storage, which feels a lot like a shake-down. The restore helped maybe a little bit, hard to say, but Mail was still not really functional. Deleted and re-added accounts also, and that did not help. Apple support was not particularly helpful, since their operating assumption is that everyone is completely clueless and hasn't done simple things like rebooting their phone.

So I tracked my problem (blank screens, crashing, laggy response, mail disappearing...) down myself to my work-related account, by deleting each account and seeing how they behaved. gmail itself was OK, my work-related account was not good by itself. I talked to my work sysadmin who immediately figured out what was happening, which was that about 25 years ago (!) he set things up to deal with everyone's different mail files, and that decision meant that everyone's /home directories were being treated as mail directories. Well, people (like me) dump a lot of stuff in those /home directories, and what I think has happened is that Apple has started to cache EVERYTHING in Mail directories to the phone. If you have more junk there than the phone has RAM, it either swaps it to disk (if you have enough) or it just fills up the RAM and crashes. I tested this by getting rid of lots of old junk in my /home directory on my server, and sure enough Mail is much better (but still not what I would consider "normal" or satisfactory, but at least functional.


What does this mean for you? Well, it might be that some people have a huge number of old mail messages either in their inbox, or in archived mail, or drafts, or spam, or whatever. And it may be that now Apple is trying to cache all of that stuff on the phone and using up all the RAM or trying to swap (which is slow). So some of you might try deleting all your spam (for example) and seeing if that helps, or even (gasp!) deleting old mail, or backing it up somewhere, etc. If you click on your account after opening mail (if you have more than one, it will be in the shaded lines below the line with the "envelope" icon) you will see what Mail thinks is in your directory on your host. If there are a lot of things that don't look like mail (other files or whatever) then that probably does mean you have stuff in there that is slowing things down, and you may have to figure out how to remove it on the host itself.


All of this has come up with iOS 13.1.3/13.2 because Apple has done something in how it handles IMAP. While there may be good reasons for it (I would guess they thought it was faster; or maybe they have AppleMail that they want to force people to buy...) there is no excuse for the Mail app to crash or behave so poorly without at least providing an error message like "Mail can't load host directory" or whatever.


Good luck.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Nov 5, 2019 7:37 AM in response to Tyrus_Rex_KTF

I hope this is helpful: First, following Apple's advice I restored my entire iPhone which is a big pain, and forced me to pay for more iCloud storage, which feels a lot like a shake-down. The restore helped maybe a little bit, hard to say, but Mail was still not really functional. Deleted and re-added accounts also, and that did not help. Apple support was not particularly helpful, since their operating assumption is that everyone is completely clueless and hasn't done simple things like rebooting their phone.

So I tracked my problem (blank screens, crashing, laggy response, mail disappearing...) down myself to my work-related account, by deleting each account and seeing how they behaved. gmail itself was OK, my work-related account was not good by itself. I talked to my work sysadmin who immediately figured out what was happening, which was that about 25 years ago (!) he set things up to deal with everyone's different mail files, and that decision meant that everyone's /home directories were being treated as mail directories. Well, people (like me) dump a lot of stuff in those /home directories, and what I think has happened is that Apple has started to cache EVERYTHING in Mail directories to the phone. If you have more junk there than the phone has RAM, it either swaps it to disk (if you have enough) or it just fills up the RAM and crashes. I tested this by getting rid of lots of old junk in my /home directory on my server, and sure enough Mail is much better (but still not what I would consider "normal" or satisfactory, but at least functional.


What does this mean for you? Well, it might be that some people have a huge number of old mail messages either in their inbox, or in archived mail, or drafts, or spam, or whatever. And it may be that now Apple is trying to cache all of that stuff on the phone and using up all the RAM or trying to swap (which is slow). So some of you might try deleting all your spam (for example) and seeing if that helps, or even (gasp!) deleting old mail, or backing it up somewhere, etc. If you click on your account after opening mail (if you have more than one, it will be in the shaded lines below the line with the "envelope" icon) you will see what Mail thinks is in your directory on your host. If there are a lot of things that don't look like mail (other files or whatever) then that probably does mean you have stuff in there that is slowing things down, and you may have to figure out how to remove it on the host itself.


All of this has come up with iOS 13.1.3/13.2 because Apple has done something in how it handles IMAP. While there may be good reasons for it (I would guess they thought it was faster; or maybe they have AppleMail that they want to force people to buy...) there is no excuse for the Mail app to crash or behave so poorly without at least providing an error message like "Mail can't load host directory" or whatever.


Good luck.

Oct 22, 2019 2:26 PM in response to phone6ssab

I think @phone6ssab has a good point...it seems as if Apple has changed the way IMAP functions, and now messages are being stored locally and checking with the primary server happens less frequently, in some cases never until the phone is rebooted. Hence e-mails that are "deleted" but are still there, or mail not really syncing correctly with the primary server. For me, the problem is much worse with my simple linux-based mail server I use for work; if I delete that account, my gmail seems to work mostly OK (I didn't try it for very long so I don't know if after a while it develops problems). I also find that, as time goes on, the problems get worse, and since with my linux-server account there both that and my gmail don't work, my suspicion is that there is a memory leak in the new mail. The more I try to check my mail, the worse the problem gets until only rebooting seems to solve it. A memory leak would be quite embarrassing; I'd fail my undergraduates if they left a leak in their code.

Oct 22, 2019 1:48 PM in response to Earny007

iPhone 6S Plus was updated to 13.1.3 (but problems started earlier) and indeed IMAP mail problems.

We use provider ONE.COM for some mailboxes. My other Android Galaxy S7 and serveral PC's doing exactly the same IMAP stuff and this simple WORKS!

I think it is related to SSL/TLS somehow ... editing the 2 accounts and disabling SSL for the IMAP connection suddenly pulls in mails etc. But off course, this is not an option to leave it like this...

Tried erasing + recreate 1 of the mailboxes ... already failed during creation stating that "imap.one.com" was unresponsive...

Well...my Android on Wifi and serveral PC's are doing exactly the same "imap.one.com" and that works fine.


I'm logging a official ticket tomorrow, this is too sad for words, such a basic service...


Nov 14, 2019 12:36 AM in response to scott.lugar

This a has happened to me as well (Outlook email used in the Apple mail App). They only solution (which isn't ideal but may help in the short term) is to come out of your email by pressing the home button. Then press the home button twice in quick succession. There you will see all your open apps. Swipe up the Apple email App, press the home button again and re-start your email session. Like I said, not really the answer (this lies with Apple who seems to be treating this issue as a low priority). Good luck!

Oct 26, 2019 12:15 PM in response to Earny007

I am having similar problems with iOS 13.1.3 and MS Outlook mail - these issues are all when using iphone X: as others noted, does not mark messages as "unread" (either have to leave the message open at the very top for several seconds, or close and re-open); it is now stripping email thread from original emails (and I have checked settings, definitely have not changed any of that) whether forwarding or replying in both the "sent" version of email and the email being received - I need to see full email threads, not just latest reply; still getting duplicate messages in "sent" box (thankfully only one on the receiving end). Am seriously considering going back to iOS 12!!

Oct 30, 2019 10:58 AM in response to Arbelaquilter

Couldn’t agree more. I cannot believe quite how bad this update has been. I can’t help wondering if Apple has been hacked or sabotaged and am very concerned for its future. Everything about Apple that makes it different from the other IT companies now seems to have been lost along with thousands of my archived e-mails, many of which are important to the functioning of my business. I simply cannot afford to use a system that has become this unreliable and see no point in paying a premium for hardware which now offers little other advantage.

Oct 30, 2019 6:35 PM in response to Achilles_

So I installed 13.2, in the hope that it would be better. Some good, some bad: now Mail crashes multiple times after any phone reboot, and sometimes it has the behavior it did under 13.1.3 (blank pages, mail that takes forever to load, laggy response) but once the mail does load (which may take multiple tries) it does seem to behave normally. Like before, however, using it many times during the day makes it grow worse and worse in terms of response (blank pages last longer before mail loads) and forces me to reboot the phone, which starts the whole crash cycle over again.


While I can imagine there is some setting in my (work-related) IMAP that has been deprecated by Apple and that it the cause of my trouble, there really is no excuse for a standard app like this to crash---it should throw an error and complain, but crashing means someone really did not do a serious job here.

Nov 5, 2019 8:30 PM in response to Earny007

Today I opened up my Apple Mail app (I use gmail), & watched my emails “flicker”/scroll (like it had a mind of it’s own) to see them ALL disappear. I had various folders, emails are all gone from those folders. The only one in my trash folder are dated 2013 and back.

i turned off my phone as I saw this happening. When I restarted & opened Mail, the rest were deleted. HELP 😳

Nov 14, 2019 12:50 AM in response to MrsPink29

The Apple Mail app still works, it just has a few rough edges and is not as good (yet) as in the iOS 12. It seems as though they have made changes for the sake of it - with some of these changes not properly thought through. For security reasons I would update, however, if you want to keep the functions of ios12 version then I would wait until the bugs are sorted out, how long the wait is, is anyones guess?

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I have the latest ios 13.1.3 and the apple mail app has major issues, has anyone else had problems? I have the latest ios 13.1.3 and the apple mail app has major issues, has anyone else had problems?

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