iCloud mail extremely slow to load

I got my call back from the Apple rep I’ve been communicating with. He said engineering is making changes on the back end to the servers that have been bogged down with higher traffic during the weekday. He also said that anyone who is being told there is no problem should immediately request to speak to a senior adviser. He also said that he would call again Monday to inform me of any progress.

Hello,

Maybe this is an iCloud error not syncing data between devices. I have also encountered this error and you can try it mine below.

Once iCloud sync is connected between devices, you can take photos or edit documents on one device, and the changes sync instantly with other devices that share them. iCloud account with you. But sometimes the changes are not synchronized smoothly, you can try the tip below to fix the error.

First power off your iOS device, wait about a minute and reboot.

Next, use a network connection speed test application such as SpeedTest to check whether the connection is guaranteed or not? If the upload and download speeds are too slow, reboot the router to fix the connection error.

Finally, log out of your iCloud account and sign in again for the device to connect and sync again.

Thanks,

If you go to https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ it shows that iCloud Mail is slow or unavailable for some users. That tells me it is a mail system problem and that they are aware of it. It is definitely on the server side in my opinion. It is across devices and connection methods for me.

There is a work around. Just in case you have another iCloud account or another email service. I have 2 iCloud accounts, one has been unaffected so I changed my settings on iCloud.com to forward emails from the problem account to the other one. That works well, messages come in very quickly and load almost instantly. I don’t know if it is worth setting up a new account if you don’t already have one. But as unreliable as iCloud is it might not be a bad idea.

After the 10am slow down this morning things seemed to get better. An hour or two later it seemed like the “checking for mail” and “updated just now” were completing faster than they had been. So I went and turned off my email forwarding. And things have definitely improved, unless I’m just deluding myself and today is really a holiday that I wasn’t aware of.

But the emails that had been taking a minute or so to load are appearing almost immediately. And the test emails I sent myself came in about 30 seconds instead of 3-5 minutes as before. I am keeping all my digits crossed but this does seem almost back to normal. A couple more emails came in as I was typing this and they both loaded immediately, other than late evenings and weekends that was the first time that has occurred for those specific emails. Still holding my breath but something has changed.

It’s returned to normal for myself and many others but that doesn’t help you. Do you have another email account? If you do you can forward your iCloud emails to that account and check them in that account. I did that for a while when the problem was ongoing. I have 2 iCloud accounts and only one was having an issue. Forwarding to the good account the messages came in almost immediately and loaded very quickly. It also proved that it was an iCloud issue having nothing to do with my devices or connection.

If you have another iCloud account or gmail or some other account you could try that as a work around for now.

Support called me back this evening, said he’s been fielding several calls about this. He said he heard from engineering that they were aware and had noticed an increase in the issue about 3 days ago and are trying to track it down. It is scattered. I have 2 iCloud accounts, one is fine with no such issues, the other is the same as all these other posts. My wife’s iCloud account has no issues either.

This is a good site to see where such issues are popping up.

https://downdetector.com/status/icloud/map/

Many people have. During peak day time hours some accounts slow to a crawl. Then overnight it improves dramatically, essentially back to normal till around mid morning the next day. This weekend has been completely normal. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. They have had a server issue that could not handle the increased traffic during peak hours. Their engineers are aware of this and have been working on it. Tomorrow around 10am EST we will know how much progress there’s been.

I have set up a work around. I have two iCloud accounts, so this might not be an option for others. I have set emails to the problem account to forward to the other account. Since doing that emails, such as notifications for new posts on this thread come in very quickly and load immediately. This is actually working very well. It’s not acceptable that users have to go to such lengths because of Apple’s poor service but it relieves a lot of my frustration for the time being.

Hi mnichols1313,

We understand you're experiencing an issue with iCloud Mail on multiple devices. Does this also occur on multiple networks? We would also recommend the steps in the following article:

If iCloud Mail isn't working

Hope this helps!

Have a great day.

mnichols1313,

Let's continue isolating the issue. Are your devices updated with current OS versions? Are other iCloud services effects such as Calendar or Contacts, or are any other apps slow to load? When this occurs, do you see any error message?

Thank you.

“ I've had this issue since last Wednesday.” That’s about when the worst of this started for me. Really wasn’t having much of an issue prior to that. That was me who is forwarding to my other iCloud account which hasn’t had any issues. That is working but if I reply to it I have to tap on the sending address to change it from the other address to the one it was sent to. It is stupid to have to do this and I’m kinda tired of it but it does speed things up significantly.

There’s nothing you can do on your end. Try to call in and ask for a senior rep to get a case number established. They’ll have you jump through a few hoops but don’t do anything more drastic than reboot a device. If you go to iCloud.com and click on Mail there you will see the same issue which shows it’s not related to any device. Once you get the email with that case number reply to it every day so that rep will continue to see it. And then there’s Twitter - @AppleSupport #iCloud. I’ve been using that every day.

Right, I was saying the mail app slowed down on my PHONE once I paired my Apple Watch. I’m wondering if syncing emails to the watch is causing it to slow down. I may test by unpairing my watch and resetting it. I’ll report back.