iPhone 4 mail download progress indicator appears stuck

Should add to this - tried to put "Push" for the iCloud account to "Manual".

Reinstalled all other mail accounts

No problems with sending or receiving mail.

iCloud - when I manually try to send or receive mail - the problem is still there.

same problem here...

I have the same problem and have tried all the options above, but ultimately I still get the same 'stuck on downloading' message

Thank you very much! This solved the issue on my iPad 2.

I had the same problem. I closed and reopened the eMail app. I power cycled the phone. I resynced with iTunes. I'm not about to delete all my eMail accounts and reconstruct them - that's just nuts! In short, nothing worked for long - the problem came back after receiving any eMails. So I started going methodically through Accounts (listed below Inboxes). I found an eMail that I attempted to send, but for some reason, it never sent. It was marked with the Exclamation Point in a red circle. I deleted this failed outbound eMail and my problem with the stuck "downloading" message stopped and has stayed stopped for days. I'm sorry to report I don't recall exactly where I found the failed outbound mail, but I'm pretty sure it was in the Sent folder for my most used eMail account.

I tried closing and opening Mail, and powering down the phone. I still had the stuck downloading problem.

I then turned Airplane Mode on and then turn it back off. That worked for me. It's probably not a catch all, but it is another thing to try.

Resetting the Mail app did not work for me. Only a hard reset (power cycling) worked. But that was pretty stressful since I wasn't sure it wouldn't delete all my contacts or trash other data. I don't think it did.

I hope this also prevents the app from losing track of which e-mails have been downloaded, and re-downloading them again (3rd time).

After the hard reset (power cycle) fixed the stuck Download message, I also found a stuck outgoing message. I deleted that and that seemed to restore normalcy.

The workarounds that we've used to get rid of the download hanging message may not be as benign as people were assuming. Take a look at how much is listed for "Documents & Data" for the Mail app. After deleting all messages, including the Sent and Trash, I have 507 MB of files that are apparently lost, as detailed at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5324174. There seems to be no way of getting rid of this huge collection of lost files except to erase all content and settings for the entire phone.

It is amazing that bugs like this keep going for years. This thread started in 2010. And it is amazing that there is no way to delete all content for the Mail app except by deleting all content and settings for the entire phone.

I solved it by just doing a soft re-boot (holding Power button and Home button). Now it shows fine. I am using iOS 8.2 on an iPhone 6+