Yahoo mail not downloading in background on iOS 18

I escalated the issue and spoke with a higher level technical support representative today (12/15), and she acknowledged that there’s an issue with Yahoo mail in the Mail app with iOS 18.2.

The workaround is to use the Yahoo mail app until it gets fixed. There’s no eta on the resolution, but she said that it’s a high priority to fix it because it affects so many people.

@Petr-x. If you look for my prior comments, I have listed what is working and not for 18.3 I have been running 18.3 for awhile and have found the only way to get “normal” mail behavior currently is to never force close the Mail app. Leaving it running in the background and I get my mail like normal. I have even rebooted the phone a couple times to see and still the same thing. Have to have the mail app running in background to work, if not then only when plugged in do they download/act normal.

I have not see any attachment issues. I tested several emails with attachments moving them around to different folders today after reading your comment and not seeing that on my end. Sorry to hear you are having those issues. Do they show up on the actual Yahoo mail app/site?

I only had trouble with Yahoo mail, all other accounts were behaving as usual after iOS 18 was installed.

This is my experience:

Behaviour before iOS 18.1 was installed:

• Mail app would not download any Yahoo emails (but show the number of new emails in the badge or in the count inside the Apple Mail app). Maybe they would show up the next day, and this leads me to think that the issue is somehow related to charging the phone, which I usually do overnight). Something like this was reported by digitalDreamRenderer in a previous post, but just plugging in the phone wouldn't work for me.
• When going to the Yahoo mails and swiping down the screen, it would trigger an endless loop of quick "updating", "updated", "updating", "updated"... . Actually, in the end (after a minute or so of the loop going on) it would report "Error downloading email", reporting an "Error POSIX 60"
• Other emails (Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, etc) were behaving as usual

Behaviour after iOS 18.1 was installed:

• Yahoo email is checked every 15 minutes and messages actually show up in the Apple Mail app. If a mail is received, but the 15-min window hasn't expired yet, swiping the screen down and releasing causes the new emails to be downloaded (even waiting some time, like 10-15 secs with the app open causes the messages to download)
• Other accounts behave normally (they always did)

I am not sure if the notifications are working fine, though. When new emails are downloaded I don't see any notification badge. But this might have been always the case, I am not 100% sure. This is true for all email accounts, so it might be a matter of changing notification settings.

I take it back - this is still not working correctly. Yahoo mail only downloads when power is plugged in or when I open the Mail app, otherwise I get no notifications at all. For all other email providers it's working fine.

Workarounds I found so far:

• using Yahoo! Mail app (you get instant notifications if an email arrives). It shows in-app ads though :-(
• using Outlook mail client for my Yahoo account.

I also tried Edison Mail (a third party mail app), and it also works correctly. The issue seems to be limited to the Apple Mail app.

I am also puzzled as to why this issue hasn't been diagnosed and fixed yet. I wonder if Yahoo mail has become too niche (230m users vs 1.8b users for Gmail in 2024 according to this) to grant a proper investigation by Apple. Anyway, I just filed another feedback ticket, for what it's worth...

After updating to iOS 18.1, it appears to have gone back to normal. I can see emails in the Mail app (updates still occurring every 15 as per settings). If I refresh the page, new emails will be downloaded correctly as pre-iOS18 behaviour.

I have tested since my last post and with app closed it works correctly. It seems 18.3.1 has fixed my Yahoo mail issues. I can get mail fetched correctly in all situations.

• Plugged into power, app open in background or force closed
• Not plugged into power, app open in background or force closed

Problem appears to be related to fetch emails in general as I cannot get sound notifications when gmail received. Tech would not acknowledge that there is an issue and took me through all the steps I had already taken. Using outlook app in interim. Will not go the forwarding route to my iCloud email as that will involve paying for more storage. Will just have to wait it out as Apple must eventually fix this or lose customers to Android 'phones.

I tried many of the fixes in this thread and the one that worked for me was plugging in my phone. I had deleted my Yahoo account, and re-added it. My inbox was empty, but as soon as I plugged into power it downloaded my entire Inbox. Definitely a bug on Apple's part here as it continually is "Connecting", knows how many unread emails are in the account, but never actually downloads them.

Did anyone else see the fact that when on wireless and charging, the yahoo accounts work perfectly fine? At least for me they do, everything is being fetched and downloaded as usual, but only when on wireless and charging. So this is the issue, I believe that the app is in some kind of low power mode (the phone is not) so this is what Apple needs to fix…

I hadn’t heard anything back from Apple support, so I decided to call in. The advisor (3rd one) told me I had a call scheduled for 5 pm today about the response from engineering. She told me she could give me the response.

She said it’s a known issue that will be fixed in a future update, but she couldn’t say which update as Apple has been really busy fixing bugs. I asked if that meant some version of iOS 18 or iOS 19 and she couldn’t say. She did say the problem is with the Mail app.

Basically Apple is aware Mail in iOS is broken, but there is no ETA on fixing it.

I have no idea why the first advisor I spoke to strung me along for over a month.

ars_gr,

I posted previously about this issue and my experience with iOS 18.3 in this thread.

Here is mg response again for you to read:

I have been following this thread for awhile as I too suffer from this issue. I updated to iOS 18.3 and after a few days I have noticed the following.

• If the phone is not plugged in and the mail app is closed and not running in the background, I will only get emails/notifications after I open the app.
• If the phone is plugged in, the mail app can be open, closed, or running in background and it works as expected.
• If the phone is not plugged in and the mail app is running the background I get notifications and the expected behavior of the fetch system. But if I force close the app, it stops.

There is actually a setting for this particular behavior. If your fetch settings are set to “automatic”, it will only download over WiFi and when connected to power. The issue is that if your fetch settings are set to 15, 30, or 60 minutes, it functions as though you’re doing a manual fetch.

I have no idea. I opened a case with senior level support on November 9 and have had logs collected now 3 separate times (though mail log collection always fails). I thought some kind of progress was being made, but I’ve basically started over from scratch today (December 19).

I thought it was odd that support told me to delete and re-add my Mail account after upgrading to iOS 18.2 as if that was expected to fix the problem. It seems like they were just hoping it would.

Of note, I’ve actually looked at the Mail logs, having installed the Mail logging profile, and I can see that it always says there is nothing to download when checking for mail when not on power. In addition, when checking for unread mail, I sometimes see very odd results. For example -3 unread emails. What I don’t understand is why there is a difference when the phone is not charging. When plugged in, everything works just fine, even if I’m not on WiFi. As such the mechanism must be different when on power or manually opening the Mail app.

It’s annoying that the “fix” for Yahoo Mail not downloading in the background is to use a battery case.