Gmail cannot verify server identity on iPhone

Go to Settings/Passwords & Accounts, tap on the gmail account and delete it. Then restart your phone, and add the account back.

I have seen hundreds of reports of this basic issues, and the answers are generally something like delete your account and reset it. My complaint is not that I don't know about the bad cert, but the intrusiveness of the dialog. My provider had an issue with their certificate. We know that. I do not want my phone to bring up this dialog literally every few seconds. I do not want to delete an app, or an account. The problem is temporary. It will fix itself. How do I get the dialog to stop interfering with everything I do? It is aggressive. I told it to cancel. I ask for details and it acts just like cancel - another bug. I am not asking it for any updates. I am not refreshing my email. I tried shutting off notifications for the email. And background app refresh. This is a bad design. Never should an error message just keep popping up (particularly a dialog that stops whatever it is I was doing), over and over, without giving me any way to acknowledge that I understand, and silence it at least for some reasonable amount of time. This is not the first time that this has happened to me, and I suspect many others. I would love to hear of some ways to temporarily disable it without having to reenter my account settings, delete an app, etc. But I would love even more for someone at Apple to take note and acknowledge that this is not an ideal situation and log it as a possible future UI improvement.

Regards.

If deleting and re-adding your Gmail account does not help, check your calendars and see what your subscribed calendars are.

I had that pop up on all my iOS devices for the longest time. I deleted all my email accounts and re-added them I reset my settings and nothing worked. And then I looked at my calendar and saw that it was the server for a calendar that I had subscribed to a couple of years ago for an event. Something must’ve changed and it was popping up as invalid. I deleted that calendar subscription, and that fixed my problem.

if your iOS calendar is subscribed to your Gmail account, that may be part of your problem.

Good luck.

To make a request to Apple use https://apple.com/feedback. When a number of similar requests are cataloged they really do look into it as a possible change. Of course, then there are users who don’t like the change; one example is the change to the way text editing works in iOS 13. For years users complained about the magnifying glass, so Apple changed it. Now people complain that the magnifying glass paradigm is gone.

Apple does not monitor Apple Support Communities for suggestions. The forum is just too busy (it’s the most active support forum on the Internet) and there are lots of wildly divergent views. It is primarily a user-to-user technical support forum, and discussion of Apple policy is not allowed. When a really serious issue appears users at level 6 and higher have access to a private forum where we can communicate with the forum hosts directly, so we have a path to escalate issues through the hosts to engineering. We try to save that only for really serious, widespread problems because of the “cry wolf” problem. Currently the only one that has been escalated with the current version is the fact that the most recent WhatsApp version breaks the Sharing function (the box with an up arrow). And that because no app should be able to break a built in iOS function.

BTW, I agree that the constant popups are not the right way to deal with the problem, and that you should be able to say you accept the invalid certificate without having to reinstall the account. And it’s quite possible that it is actually a bug that keeps that from working. But so far it’s not considered a bug that has risen “above the line” of things to fix. Any complex software has thousands of bugs that are sorted by severity and how many users they affect. Things that have workarounds fall below the line, unless they can be fixed while working on a more serious bug. And this particular one is a very rare occurrence; the only time I see it is accessing an email server that I administer where I know the cert has expired because I chose not to renew it, and that because it will be retired soon. But deleting the account, rebooting, and adding it back fixes it for me until I have to reinstall my system.

I had tried that originally, but it seems that you need to do that and then reboot. Otherwise, I think it is already stuck in a pattern that just turning the account off doesn't help. But, thanks - this sequence does stop it. I seem to recall having an app, some time ago that had a similar problem, and in that case it may be impossible to do anything but remove the app as things currently stand, but for an email account, this is sufficient. Is the contact support method you suggested the proper channel for still trying to get my 'change request' or 'feature request' or 'UI improvement suggestion' to Apple, or is this forum (or some other) monitored and used for that sort of thing? Or is there really no way to try and make a recommendation that really matters.

Regards.

Hi Hwny. Your response popped up in my email. I’ve gone through all your responses, but I can’t tell which account server you’ve been getting messages from.

Anyway. If the email modifications did not fix the problem, did you try looking at your calendar iCal subscriptions? Check in the calendar app (old method of subscription) and via “passwords and accounts” (current iOS) and also the calendar app on your computer. If that server shows up as one of your calendars, delete it.

Really hope it helps. It is very frustrating.

It really drove me nuts when it was happening to me, and was happening on all my iOS devices, and it would happen almost every time I turned on the device or tried to do something, very intrusive. I deleted all my email accounts re-added them, rebooted the phone, reset all my connection settings etc. and it continued. It only went away when I went to my calendars and realized that I subscribed to a calendar on that URL. Once I deleted that calendar, I have not had it happen again. Now watch, I probably jinxed myself. LOL.

Thank you for your reply. I understand very well your point about fraud etc., but this does not make it OK or desirable to have an interface that literally interrupts you every few seconds - so much so that even deleting the account becomes difficult. I suspect, based on your response, you may have never dealt with this. I view the comment regarding competent business as a bit harsh and unrealistic - all businesses that work in tech, including Apple, have technical issues, as well as administrative issues. Competent businesses minimize and take responsibility for them - but they still have issues. I would suggest that the number of times this popup is reported on the forums would allow us to infer it happens quite a bit.

But regardless, you mistake my request. I am not asking for anybody to take responsibility for my communications integrity. I am not even asking to be able to send or receive an email. I am asking that the popup not make my phone practically unusable. There are countless ways that my phone may not be able to send and receive email at any given time - no network, airplane mode, server down, misconfiguration. None of these bring a popup to the screen over and over again, unprompted by me. To be clear - I am looking at apple music, and the popup about email certs comes up every few seconds. I look at the news, and the popup about email certs comes up, every few seconds. So frequently, that there is not enough time to do things like typing in a URL to search for why the popup is coming up without getting interrupted. And, as I said - the popup has a button that says 'details', which appears to have no effect. Certainly this is not the intention?

Lastly, I am not asking for "someone at Apple to acknowledge that you should be allowed to accept a connection to what may be a fraudulent account". I am asking for a way to make this popup go away, at least for a while, without deleting account information. Something like disable the account, or turn off refresh, etc. There might be many people having trouble because of the same certificate. Indeed there are many I work with having this problem right now, for the same cert that I do. In fact it is hard to imagine a cert problem like this not affecting many people, by the very nature of a server certificate. For all of them to delete their account info and get reconfigured (which can often be a painful experience), to just stop the popup for a few hours so their phone is usable - seems to be a waste.

Regards.

Thanks for posting that; I had forgotten the issue with some subscription calendars.

An invalid certificate might just be that your email certificate has expired, or it may be that criminals have taken over the account or redirected DNS to a fake site to steal information from you. Apple doesn’t know which it is, so it will always post that warning. And, BTW, no competent business lets their certificates expire. It opens them up to fraud.

The only way to get past it is to delete the account, restart the phone, and add it back. You will then be asked if you want to trust the bad certificate or not, thus transferring the responsibility from Apple to you if something bad happens. You won’t lose anything by doing this, because all of your mail will resync from the server in a few minutes.

If you would like someone at Apple to acknowledge that you should be allowed to accept a connection to what may be a fraudulent account you must contact Apple. This is a user-to-user forum, and is not a way to contact Apple. For that you should use the Contact Support link at the top of this page. But better yet contact your IT department and have them fix their problem.

One other thing - because there are no details, beyond the URL given - it could be very difficult to determine which app would be causing such a problem. If the domain name in use, does not clearly associate with the name of the app, then there is little to give you an indication which app is having issue. Maybe the details box would have given enough info if it were working, but as it stands - I think it would be a real problem. Honestly, I could easily imagine many people wouldn't even be able to determine what is was even for a mail server.

Regards.

Thanks again for your attention. I sent in a report to the link you pointed out. Hopefully it can be of help to someone. As one last oddity, when I was going through my settings to find my exact IOS version (and after I had thought this was 'fixed'), the popup came up again. Only once. Not sure what triggered it, something in the settings menus possibly, but it seems that disabling the email was not 100% effective - although it certainly makes it usable now.

Regards.

Well, fortunately from me - I knew that I had a problem with the email cert before I even knew I had the popup issue. So figuring out which server it was (and which app/account) was not the problem this time. But, your post did remind me of something. As I said previously, I had seen this for a non-email situation before, but I couldn't recall exactly what it was. And it was indeed a calendar as you suggest. If I recall, it was either an NFL or NHL schedule calendar. And it was indeed super frustrating - the mapping from the server information to a calendar was not obvious. I had to google the domain info and infer the calendar app back from there. Hopefully this discussion helps someone. As I also said previously, I put in an official comment to Apple. I realize I am one of billions, but I can only do what I can do.

Disabling the email account, and rebooting did basically work, except for a single time when I went into my iphone system settings. I suspect there was some action that happened in there that possibly ignored the fact that the email was disabled, or had it's own cached copy of the email server info. Either way, that was a one off and far from an issue. Thanks for the response.

Regards.

Well, you can stop it by turning off the recalcitrant account in Settings/Passwords & Accounts. Tap on the account and turn it off. Or set the account to Fetch instead of Push or Scheduled.