ios 18 IMAP support - mail says 'connecting' forever on IMAP accounts

I think there are/were multiple issues, which confuses diagnosis. As a workaround I had disabled imap-IDLE on my (Dovecot) mail server and my iOS 18.2 iPhone was able to get mail, but was still hanging at times.

After updating to iOS 18.2.1, I re-enabled imap-IDLE and mail seems to be working normally. It uses imap-IDLE (near-realtime delivery) when the mail app is open and fetches every 15 minutes otherwise. It gets the mail messages and alerts correctly.

I just sent in a ticket to /feedback.

For me, this turns out to be a “yellow battery” on 18.x thing. If you are on “Low power” mode, you will see Connecting… for IMAP servers like dovecot.

The moment you switch back to full power mode it works fine. This is also confirmed new for 18.x. Many more of us hang out on low power mode it would be nice to fix.

My other work around was to switch to /TRASH or another folder before reading /INBOX. That also worked and also suboptimal.

Hope this helps!

Hi all,

I encountered a similiar problem with iOS 18, the Mail app told me "SERVERBUG", other Mailclients and all iOS versions before didnt had any problem.

After the problem didnt seemed to be solved in iOS 18.1, i digged deeper into dovecots server log files. I realized that there was an IMAP folder always shown in the log, contained an "ß" (German s-z). I renamed the folder, so i didnt contain any special chars anymore - and et voila, it worked. I now can access all mails via IMAP, move them, send mails - maybe this helps.

Cheers,

M

I made two changes on the Dovecot server, and iOS 18 Mail app is working for the first time since upgrading from 17. None of the other mail clients had a problem.

In /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf

1. I removed INDEX=MEMORY from mail_location and then Mail pulled about 40 messages before hanging
2. I set mail_prefetch_count = 20 and then Mail said it was downloading 1,200 emails, new messages show up too

So add me to the list of people with Apple Mail issues, specifically on iPad and iPhone after upgrading to IOS 18.x. I run a dovecot server. In my case, I enabled debug logging for IMAP and found the iPad starting to prefetch messages then stopping in the middle of that with no error. It would just stop and eventually reconnect, try again, and repeat the pattern. Meanwhile, on the client, I saw a message about Downloading messages that hung indefinitely.

Per a suggestion earlier in this thread, I added "mail_prefetch_count = 50" to my dovecot.conf and now it works fine. My theory is that if Apple Mail experiences the slightest delay when fetching messages, it hangs. It is a new problem for me. I've been running Apple Mail (on iPad and iPhone) with dovecot for years without issue and without having to change that setting.

Also, other email clients like Outlook worked fine without the dovecot change. The issue is specific to Apple Mail (on iPad and iPhone). Apple Mail on my Mac also worked fine without the dovecot change.

Hopefully this helps someone, at least if you're hosting your own server.

Ok, so a whole set of time on this. Back and forth with rawlogs on dovecot, could constantly prove that "yellow battery" low power was causing mail to not pull, it would pull just fine in normal power mode.

In a strange turn of events to get rawlogs without TLS, I decided to just remove the IMAP account from the phone and put it back as it was and resynced it. Surprise, low power now works just fine.

I doubt we may ever find out what happened or what changed, I'm on 18.1.1 I'm putting this one to bed as just "something weird" on the phone. My wife's phone who has not yet deleted and added the mailbox again through mail accounts dialog still has the "yellow power no email for you" symptoms, but fine on high power.

Whether this "fix" is permanent who knows, but for now it's doing what it's supposed to and I'm going to get on with life.

Hope this helps any travelers coming this way.

Confirmed working now finally on 18.3. Even yellow low power mode.

No changes to dovecot. If on 18.2 please upgrade, this below also helped until 18.3.

Mail cannot function in IOS 18.2 if iClou… - Apple Community

I’ve commented on this thread a number of times. This topic has been viewed over 5,000 times and I’m amazed to say that the 18.2.1 update is EVEN worse.

Yellow battery low power *never* downloads email, and now regular power takes an extremely long time often minutes to resolve the inbox.

I have been forced to install Microsoft Outlook for local IMAP which works every time.

Is anyone from @apple monitoring or looking into this after many formal feedback requests?

I have two email accounts that use IMAP, and both of them failed on ios 18 and ipadOS 18. In some other threads on the discussions, many people are trying things -- some have temporary luck, and some report that deleting accounts and adding them back doesn't fix it. A few have reported that turning off SSL in the advanced settings for the mail account works, but most IMAP servers are set to accept only secure connections -- mine are this way, so this doesn't work for me.

I have an ipad still on 17 and it has no problems with either account -- the devices I upgraded to ios 18, stopped fetching new mail when they were updated and none of them have been able to get new mail at all. Only that one ipad on ipados 17 and my macs can get mail. I'm convinced it is definitely a bug in the ios mail app and for me there is no workaround and I've tried all the ones suggested in the numerous threads, blog posts, and tweets about this issue.

best thing to do, and @KiltedTim was good to suggest this in another thread is to go to apple.com/feedback and report the bug.

I just did what someone suggested, turned off low power mode and seemed to work.

Using 18.3.1 - issue still exists when in low power mode. Just says "connecting" but nothing happens. I plugged in the power to the phone and the mail connected instantly. What's going on Apple??

Ooh. You might well be right there. The “connect” went away after switching. It might well have not downloaded anything either. This explains the odd phantom in the roundcube webmail. Did the “yellow low power” thing fix it for you? It’s clear there’s a regression in imap for iOS Mail app. Hope we get closure, I’ll keep a closer eye on it, it does appear to be a thing, certainly on yellow battery mode for sure.

I use Dovecot and iOS 18 Mail isn't working. iOS 17 is working fine.

After deleting and adding the Mail account, iOS 18 downloads the complete mail for the user (tried with multiple users), but then never receives newer emails.

Open Mail and it quickly changes from "Connecting" to "Checking for Mail..." which persists indefinitely.

• I do not have any special folder names.
• I tried changing the "/" field as other users mentioned.
• Dovecot server shows a status log on disconnect: (IDLE running for 0.001 + waiting input for 1.038 secs, 2 B in + 10 B out, state=wait-input)

I enabled imap-hibernate but no difference.

No problem with latest iPadOS and MacOS.

Server only allows SSL.

With the iOS 18, my email didn’t work either. I finally figured it out. I just turned my phone off at night and left it off till the morning . The next morning. I turned it back on and my email is back No more stuck on connecting

I’ve had no problems at all. Who is your email provider?

Have you already tried removing and re-adding the account?