How can I stop iPhone receiving email

Have you tried setting Mail Fetch to “manual”?

Note that apps that receive Notifications (which includes email) will launch when they receive a notification, even if not currently active. And, if you force quit apps routinely the process of restarting the app will use extra energy and thus drain your battery faster, so it is better to never force-quit apps unless they are not working right.

How often do you restart your phone? The logic is that while the phone has been off mail might have accumulated, so it would be natural to check to see what arrived while the phone was off.

Another idea: Go to Settings/Mail/Accounts, tap on the mail account and turn it off. That will stop all mail. If you need it in an emergency just turn it back on.

The only way is to delete the email account on your iPhone.

A good suggestion, but it doesn't work. I have both my iPhone and iPad set to Manually, and they still retrieve new emails by themselves.

Edit: Not quite true. Mail doesn't retrieve new emails until I open the app, or bring it to the foreground if it's already running. So in that sense, it's manual. But what I believe lyndaVegas means is Mail in iOS insists on tagging the app's icon with a red numbered circle no matter what settings you use. I don't need to see that. The emails will be there whether Mail hounds me with an unwanted notice or not.

I've wondered why iOS does that, too. The Mail app is closed, and yet the icon still gets flagged with unread emails. It shouldn't do that, and I haven't been able to figure out how to prevent iOS from doing that.

I'm almost never so anxious to check for new mail that I absolutely must be notified at all times. That's why I close the app to start with.

I found this searching for the same answer. I want to continue following but need some clarity on what I've read so far. I've trashed all of my mail in the app and the shown number of stored emails awaiting me on the mail app icon for mail is now blank again. Those accounts are now set to MANUAL. If I never open the mail app again, will I still see those emails from any of those accounts start piling up again with the app icon continually noting the number of emails awaiting me? Hope not. I don't use my phone for mail but want to keep the app for emergency backup.

Good advice. I'll just hope that turning it off doesn't cause me to have to set up the whole thing again as if the account was completely deleted. It's tricky business with my provider sometimes, unless it's become more automatic in recent iOs updates. Thanks, Lawrence.

Turning it off will just stop it checking for mail completely. Your ISP won’t know its off, unless your mailbox fills up. Do you receive mail on a computer or any other device? If not you can still log in to your carrier’s webmail site to review and delete mail.

I work out of my home. I check email on iPad in the morning where I read my e-newspaper with coffee. Just as you mentioned, I visit the mail server using Earthlink's webmail page on Safari, cleaning out any garbage and marking spam for deletion before it even gets loaded into my big iMac computer where Apple mail is off overnight. Then when I do my serious email work, I open Apple mail on the iMac and a cleaner batch of email loads. The Mac is also where so many files are that I would send or receive as attachments. It's become a clean and easy system for me. Nice and convenient with a generous screen and keyboard for these older eyes and big fingers. The difference between playing a grand piano vs a tiny toy piano.

When you restart the phone it will perform a manual mail retrieval.

Rats. Then it's not really MANUAL after all if simply restarting the phone fetches the mail. Sounds like a self-cancelling selection in settings.