Q: iOS5 Mail crashing

I'm not convinced that the length of the email is the cause in my case. I've experienced a couple of crashes with very little written in the email body.

I have my font size set to medium for mail, and I just pasted what amounted to 320 wrapped lines into an email message to myself. There was no problem and I have spotlight search on. Perhaps this is not the cause, or at least not the sole cause. Maybe when you guys say "long" emails you mean longer than that?

Same problem and I'm getting really tired of it.

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.

On an Original iPad, receiving emails from an IMAP server; selecting multiple emails alone generally makes it crash. it seems related to clicking on a button while the email is still rendering or going throguh animations.

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.

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.

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.

As well as Mail crashing on the iPad1, I'm also getting regular crashes when scrolling through text-based pages such as news on some apps like Skygrid. Anyone else experiencing this? If it's common I'm betting IOS5 brought a memory allocation problem with it.

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.

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.

I had no emails coming in from Android devices at all, and Mail still crashed. No signatures to remove, nothing like that.

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.

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,

Set airplane mode and then double click to see which apps are running . . . Close all of them by holding down until you get the delete sign.  "delete" all apps and then open your mail.  This has worked the two times this has happened to me.

Don't worry . . . Your apps aren't actually being deleted.

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.