Mail not working on iPhone after iOS 18 Update

I just tried downloading profile and installing it and still having issues. Was working fine until update.

I run a IMAP server with cyrus imapd for a small number of people. Two upgraded to iOS 18 and both do not see new mail arriving in their accounts. They still see the messages from before the upgrade to iOS 18. There are no errors shown on the client and there are no errors in the server logs. In the server logs I can see that the iOS 18 clients authenticate successfully to the IMAP server and that they are accessing their IMAP INBOX Send Items and Trash mailboxes (i.e. asking for a list of the messages that are in these mailboxs). When they send a mail, the send mail is stored in the send items correctly. However other IMAP operations like flagging or moving existing messages result in weird behaviour like making those messages disappear on the client.

This does not look like an authentication or TLS issue at all, something is going wrong in the interaction between iOS 18 mail client and the IMAP server. Nothing changed on the imap server, so Apple changed something that made this happen. This is very a frustrating issues for users, some of them use the iPhone/iPad as their primary means of interacting with their email.

This thread now has *27* pages of responses from people who, like me, are experiencing the same issues. And yet Apple *still* hasn’t acknowledged this is a major issue with their Mail App for most people and *still* hasn’t fixed it with the latest IOS update. Apple seems fixated on “Apple Intelligence” but it apparently doesn’t have the intelligence to recognize feedback from its customers.

Yep. There is something wrong with the Mail app. Here's my backstory:

Before posting my suggested solution, I spent around two hours Wednesday (Sept 18) on a tech support call with senior Apple advisor regarding this issue. Eventually they had me install MS Outlook. We successfully connected to my mail server using Outlook.

The Apple senior advisor said that if I could get the screen shots and application logs uploaded to them, he might be able to get back to me by Tuesday (Sept 24), because he was out of the office on Monday (Sept 23). The advisor was personable and pleasant. I have nothing against him personally. Nevertheless, he was not empowered adequately to resolve my issue or escalate it in a timely manner. So, I'm throwing Apple as a company under the bus for creating a problem with the Mail app they could not resolve for me or others.

I could not wait to resolve the issue. I am no fan of MS Outlook. So, I looked to other third-party mail apps.

Moving off of Apple Mail to a third-party mail app is a viable solution when:

• Your business email accounts are dead in the water because of the issue
• Apple support is unacceptably slow to respond to the issue
• Apple's time to market with an updated release that fixes the issue is unknown
• Perceptions of many long-time users are that the overall stability is in question
• Other available solutions work

Any news when is it going to be fixed? My work email is not downloading on the phone. Should I change something? Up to the update everything worked fine….

Try changing authentication to password instead of NTLM 

Worked for me .

jacques

iOS 18.0.1 does not fix this issue. :(

I've tried several times to delete the account and re-add it, but it hasn't worked for me so far. Currently on 18.1.1 and no fix yet.

Hello,

The iOS 18.2 update does not fix the IMAP synchronization problem

After working with a rep, I was able to resolve. Here is what I did:

Deleted the mail app

Reinstalled from the app store

After that, went to Settings > Apps > Mail > Accounts 

Enabled mail for all accounts 

Restarted the phone.

Still not working after that, so then I deleted the email account and re-added it. Mail then began working.

After struggling for the last couple of months with not being reliably able to check my IMAP email on my iPad running iOS 18.x, in frustration I reached out to my ISP, which happens to be CenturyLink. Their automated help system informed me that:

We are currently experiencing a technical issue. The Apple iOS 18.1 update is causing widespread IMAP failures with email providers and at this time they have not published a resolution. We apologize for this inconvenience and we thank you for your patience, but please note that this new update was implemented by Apple. Our server settings do not change as a result of any company's firmware updates and therefore Apple needs to determine and publish this resolution. Our technical team is however testing and working to find how we can best assist in these matters going forward. Please contact Apple support. To access any mail in the meantime, please access your email through our Webmail Platform. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Apple developers, please fix this. From reading through this chain, it's been a recurring issue over various iOS releases. Come on - you're better than this!

Idris, you really don't know what you are talking about. There is a documented architectural change in iOS 18 that broke functionality with certain mailservers. A link helpfully posted by cube_23, states:

Starting with iOS 18, Apple Mail began using a technique called "pipelining," where multiple IMAP commands are sent together in a single network packet. Specifically, after the IDLE command is terminated with the DONEcommand, iOS 18 was immediately sending other commands in the same packet.

Although Stalwart supports command pipelining, it was not prepared to handle this scenario. When it received the DONE command, it stopped processing the rest of the packet and ignored any subsequent commands that followed. This caused Apple Mail to get stuck, as its subsequent requests were not being processed correctly.

Based on the above, stephen boyle (in this closed discussion) suggested disabling advertising the IDLE capability in dovecot servers, which several of us did. This "fixed" the iOS 18 mail problem but also disabled IDLE for mac and other clients. I suspect that a service provider using dovecot would not be willing to make that compromise. An update to dovecot (and other impacted mailservers) may be able to resolve it, but a fair assessment is that Apple broke it and Apple should fix it.

While there have certainly been a number of "my email isn't working either" posts unrelated to the specific problem that is the subject matter of this and the other thread, the problem is both serious AND impacts a large number of users.

For anyone still not getting emails since the iOS18 update I managed to figure it out if you’re on Hotmail. Delete it and re add an account. It used to be under “other” option. But I tried it through the outlook option. Which I didn’t think Hotmail/live account was. Then it worked! I’m back online. Seems the update changed things that were not broken for some. Apple did it again!

Recently upgraded one phone from 17 to 18.1.1 and now have this issue. Reading the comments on this thread it is clearly an OS issue. As many have stated mail can be sent so the communication is not broken with the server. As more evidence a device running 17 has no issues with communicating with the exact same email configurations. Finally, the account was deleted and reentered. The first connection has no issues pulling the emails or allowing me to "TRUST" the certificate when presented. However the first fetch call breaks and returns the error [... "bad certificate format" -9808]

I hope this is getting attention by developers and some solution is on the way. Access to my email has become one of the prime functions of my phone and seeing to delete and recreate every time I want to "pull" email is not only inconvenient but unacceptable on a release that already has one an update, a patch applied, and reports going back weeks of the issue.

I confirm. Adding / doesn't fix that issue.