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.

52 replies

Oct 16, 2019 5:26 AM in response to Earny007

My iPhone 8 auto-updated to iOS 13.1.3 yesterday, and the mail client is a disaster. Messages disappear; the app crashes; sometimes it presents nothing but a blank page; sometimes it shows a few messages; in all cases it is maddeningly slow. For all practical purposes, Mail is now useless. I have two accounts for mail, one using a local server with imap, one just a vanilla Gmail account, and both show the same problems.

Oct 16, 2019 9:06 AM in response to Earny007

Yes same issues on the "Fixed" 13.1.13, XS Max. The only thing that has gotten me at least semi functional is toggling the "Unread" button on the bottom left on and off a few times and it basically forces a hard refresh it looks like and the mail and unread mail at least appears.


Still have the blank infinite load though if you click on the email...


this is terrible and clearly speaks to their QA team as this is simple basic functionality from 2006.

Oct 16, 2019 9:18 AM in response to Tyrus_Rex_KTF

Thank you for your reply. I think the same issue is also on the IPad OS as it turns up different results when looking up the history on the emails - none of them correct, I’ve had about 8 months of emails missing which is a bit bizarre! I think Apple have taken their eye off the ball on this one. I also toggle the unread button - which isn’t as convenient in landscape mode. (mostly to mark my emails so I can list them and come back to them). It looks as though the developers had a bright idea but didn’t quite think it through.

Oct 17, 2019 8:27 AM in response to Earny007

I am also having problems with iOS 13.1.3 email.

1) Messages that were in my inbox disappeared. I found some in Trash and some in Junk mail

2) Somehow it is now selecting which emails to put in junk folder. Things that I want to read and then delete are now being moved to junk folder automatically. I cannot find where the junk folder is set. Anyone know how to modify Junk filter?

3) if I Read a message so it is marked as read and then delete messages above it and the display panel moves down to the read message it is not highlighted in the mail list column. When I delete and move down to unread message it does highlight the new message.

4) Sometimes when I delete a message the header stays in the mail list column, but the display panel moves down to the next message. Left and right are not displaying the same message. Eventually or if I force an update it will disappear from mail list column.

5) Very slow.

6) Appears to have lost some functionality or it is hidden.


Update not well thought out or executed. IMO

Oct 22, 2019 9:15 AM in response to Earny007

My iPhone X is a disaster. 13.1.3 did not fix my email problems. Some email shows up days late. Others cannot be deleted. Most require a second deletion before they actually delete. These are the same issues that started with 13.1.1 and continued with 13.1.2. I have lost all confidence in Apple, and have taken all my devices off of automatic updates. Battery use now seems to have increased also.

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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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