IOS 18.3 and its impact on the mail problem for iPhone users

18.2 and 18.2.1 initiated this mail slowness drama on all my iOS devices. However, 18.3 has made Mail back to normal again. Also, seems the badge icon “retention” issue, that was present before, has also been resolved and the badge disappears as it should (faster)

Definitely engineering should be more on top of these issues and community messaging. Not good that something like Mail is borked for a few months without a patch.

If something works… do NOT touch it

I found specifically what's happening.

Using the iOS 18.3 Mail app, the number showing in the Flagged message folder in the list of all mailboxes indicates only the number of flagged emails in the Inbox, not both the Inbox and the Sent mailboxes. That's the specific error that has to be fixed!

Note that one can use the workaround of searching for "Flagged" and hitting the All Mailboxes selection, not the Current Mailbox.

Good Luck.

Correct. IIRC multiple times it's been identified that the built in mail app uses Apple's Private Relay DNS and if your network blocks access to those, then mail takes forever to load/work. I'll do some testing but it looks like 18.3 seems to have fixed the issue.

I was able to retrieve my content by tapping the 3 lines and changing to list view. I still do not like the icons next to each email.

Upgraded from iOS 18.1.1 to 18.3.2 on iPhone 15pro, mail app is so much slower than 18.1.1 iOS, and not crazy of icon in email address header or summary. I turn off icon and noticed body of email with icons aren’t loaded and see a box with ? mark inside all over body with links. Looks bad. This needs to be fixed as well as the performance in loading mail… the behavior is like you don’t have wifi and have the slowest or poor cell service connectivity and things take a long time to load or painful for body of message with many links incomplete. So you don’t know what you are clicking on, links work but not image…

UPDATE: Had a combination of two issues. First turned out to be the friend had exhausted is 15GB Google storage limit and new messages were not being received. However, that still did not explain some missing ones from before the time the limit was exhausted. Changed the phone to List View, turned off WiFi and Bluetooth, and rebooted. That seemed to clear the issue as newer messages appeared. Once a lot of backed up photos were deleted (not needed because they are also backed up on iCloud) new messages from the moment free space was available started coming in.

Maybe the reboot fixed it or maybe it was just a delay in Google responding to the free space but it is working now. Still going to hold off on moving from 17.7.2. I worry about the news stories that iOS 19 is going to be a major makeover comparable to the iOS 7 makeover. With hundreds of millions of people using the existing interface I keep wondering what is so wrong with it that it needs a major change that will probably break muscle memory for a lot of operations.

The ones not working correctly (imap) are gmx and netcup, though gmx is less affected than my netcup imap account and only the base path (/) is affected, folders and mails therein are not.

My exchange and exchange compatible accounts are not affected at all

IOS. 18.3.1 has a bug in the mail client. When you click the 'folder' icon, then 'move message' to save an email, it zips down and then immediately back up so that you cannot select a folder to file the email in. If the client remembers where you filed it before, that part works fine. But for new emails, it is impossible to file. This is in iPAD only; still works fine in iPhone.

A friend with iPhone 14 just reached out to me to help as he upgraded to 18.3.2 from what I do not know and Gmail stopped working. Before searching around for information I tried the usual things and no luck. I see he is not alone in email issues. Myself I have a 13 Pro still running 17.7.2 and am glad I am. Several people have commented on frustration at having upgraded to iOS 18 with Photos and now email 🙄 I will try several of the suggestions recommended here and see what happens.

I had no problems with Mail until I updated iPhone 13Pro to 18.3 today. So no, 18.3 didn't fix it, it broke it.

Don’t like the change plain and simple. Revert back prior to ios18