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iOS5 Mail crashing

Since installing iOS5 on my first-gen iPad, and also on iOS5 on my newly delivered iPhone 4S, I have had the Mail app crash on a regular basis for me. The first several times it crashed shortly after loading, so no harm was done, but this afternoon I started writing a long email response to someone on the iPhone and it crashed back to the home screen in the middle of that and lost all my edits. So I tried composing the same email espouse on the iPad, and then the same thing happened and I lost all my edits a second time. I now realize that, until a patch for Mail comes out, I can no longer rely upon it for any serious email usage, and that is very disappointing.


Is it just my pair of iOS5 devices that are suffering from this, or are others seeing the same thing?


Thanks,


- David

iPhone 4S-OTHER, iOS 5, 64GB

Posted on Oct 15, 2011 2:21 PM

Reply
222 replies

Jan 29, 2012 9:23 PM in response to Mysticfm

For me it is a specific e-mails from a user group mailing list (R project spcifically the R-help and R-SIG-Mac lists) which seem to causes the crashes. Specificaly it seems unable to full download the message and the app chrashes. I am not sure if the e-mail is particularly long. The solution is to quickly swipe and delete the e-mail before it has fully downloaded, i.e. only downloaded the header.


Hope this helps, but apple really need to gives us some feedback or post an update soon.


Cheers.

Jan 30, 2012 2:19 PM in response to Mysticfm

I am becoming VERY frustrated and annoyed by this issue. It has happened many times in the past couple of months, always when I have spent substantial time composing a reply to an email.


I have noticed it tends to coincide with activity by the mail program; one of my accounts is an Exchange server that pushes messages to the phone; I think it often crashes just after a new message is pushed in the background.


There is a workaround, which I am trying very hard to remember to adopt, and which is annoying and a pain but less of each than these crashes and loss of work--always switch to the notepad, compose your reply, copy the text, switch back to mail, then start the reply, paste it in, and hit send before the app has time to crash. Even if it does, just try again using the same text.


I really hope this gets fixed in the next IOS release. This is on an iPhone 4, BTW.

Jan 31, 2012 4:23 AM in response to Mysticfm

I only read the first 3 or 4 pages of this thread but seems like my problem is related although not exactly the same as I've read thus far. It seems that occasionally when I send a mail, either new or forward or reply, something happens at the moment I click send that basically destroys the mail I am sending, ie it disapears from screen just like it would if you successfully sent it, but the message doesn't get sent and therefore doesn't end up in sent items. This has happened on average twice a week since December, I was late upgrading to IOS5 so would assume it started after I upgraded. Assuming this problem is related to what the rest of you are having grief with it's now a problem thats nearly four months old with no sign of being fixed, on that basis the only reliable workaround I can think of is that I should only send important emails from my computer as the phone can't be trusted, maybe Blackberry isn't so bad after all.


I am on an iPhone 4, IOS5, no IMAP or POP3 just MS Exchange config.

Jan 31, 2012 5:22 AM in response to wildpitch

I am pretty sure it is IOS5 that is causing the issue because I had no trouble with IOS4.? for 6 months or so (my first iphone) before upgrading to 5. Almost immediately my email would crash sporadically. I have tried most if not all the hopeful fixes mentioned in this thread and others including a new phone with 0 success. Very frustrating. I have read nearly all the post and it seems the common thread is IOS5. Apple needs to give us something on this - its been too long with nothing official said that I am aware of.

Jan 31, 2012 10:30 AM in response to Colin McClelland1

Colin, I have an iPad1 as well, the only crashes I get are with Mail and Safari. Safari is getting more frequent. I don't have Skygrid. Other apps work fine.


I would agree with memory allocation being a problem. I have been following this forum for some time now and the sheer variety of causes of Mail crashing lead one to think that either; there are many problems with Mail after IOS 5.01 were applied or there is a root cause like memory allocation, but that is an opinion but since there doesn't seem to be any real support from Apple forthcoming, that seems to be all we have to go on.


For others, my original problem with Mail crashing was solved when it was pointed out that it would only crash when I received emails from an Samsung (Android) tablet and only when the email contained the auto generated annotation; "Sent from Samsung tablet". 100% of all my failures were caused by this. The workaround is; when replying, to remove the offending line completely. Since then Mail has never crashed on me.


Still, it is clear that most of the crashes on this thread had different causes. I am just reposting my solution, so that anyone else having a similar problems can apply the workaround.

Jan 31, 2012 12:42 PM in response to Dlaytonj2

I just wanted to thank everyone for posting because my friend (iPAD owner) had problems replying to my emails (I am a Samsung Galsxy S2 owner). It took quite a while to narrow the problem down. The problem she had was intermittently when she replied thye message just disappeared without sending. At first she realized it was only when she replied to me and only when I wrote from my phone. This forum solved our problem. I just removed my automatic signature BUT I hope Apple will fix the problem eventually. Thank you to all.

Jan 31, 2012 2:40 PM in response to Mysticfm

My iPad worked flawlessly from September 2009 until iOS 5.0. Nothing in this thread has helped to solve Apple Email Crashing. iOS 5.0 has rendered my iPad useless for email purposes. Three months since iOS 5.0 launch and nothing has been done to address this issue. ***? Maybe I should try returning the device to the Vancouver Apple Store for a refund.

Jan 31, 2012 4:20 PM in response to pjackman

Its true, you need do nothing...open mail and just wait for it.....poof gone sometimes in a minute, sometimes in five but it will go.....I notice my playlist gets reset randomly to, always going back to the top....I can live with the playlist but mail is useless, and useless on the Ipad too......dissappointing, & infuriating, not sure what they could be doing in Cupertino,

Feb 1, 2012 3:35 AM in response to Mysticfm

According to diagnostics its always thread 5 that crashes. It frequently crashes even when the phone is just sitting somewhere locked and mail is running in the background. As others have reported, it will also crash when just sitting with a message open. Looking at the diagnostic plist files it seems to be crashing at least once or twice an hour; always thread 5, at least all of the ones I have looked at are thread 5.


I've turned on sending useage and diagnostics to Apple. If others in this thread have it off, which I usually do from general privacy concerns, perhaps turn it on for a few days. If they are deluged with rubbish such as appears on my phone, that is crashes every 40 minutes or so, maybe they'll get the idea, and the data may be useful.


Re the suggestion to kill background programs (I think that's what you were suggesting, though the technique seemed more complicated than I use, which is just double click to open the task switcher, long press an icon to turn on the little kill xs, then kill a bunch, no need to turn on airplane mode) -- tried that, doesn't make any difference on my phone.


Just in case anyone didn't know--you can see the recent crash history on your phone by going to settings, general, about, diagnostics & useage, diagnostic & useage data. The names of the plist files tell you what crashed and when, and inside them there is more info. That's how I know mine is regularly crashing even when its locked and I'm not looking at it.

Feb 3, 2012 8:45 AM in response to rossalford

Yup mine does this ALL the time.


Was fine for a year before I upgraded to iOS 5 and now it crashes at least 3 or 4 times per day.


It mostly crashes while I'm not even using it. Only way out is to kill the Mail app and it usually restarts on its own.


It's massively frustrating!!!!!!


I have iCloud, IMAP and Exchange accounts running on it and have never figured out what's causing it, but it's def since I installed iOS 5.


Please please please sort it out Apple...cos it's making a Blackberry look like a very nice upgrade right now since I rely on email so much.


😐

iOS5 Mail crashing

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