Q: Push email does not work (iCloud)

Response to Perry Clark:

Are most (or even all) of us having this intermittent mail downloading issue migrants from MobileMe?  Has anyone successfully introduced Apple support to the problem?  Do they acknowledge its existence? In a word, is there hope?

I migrated from MobileMe, but I think there are non-migrators also having the problem.

I have worked with no less than 5 Senior Advisors.  One tech said he was able to re-produce the problem - he was quickly taken off of my case and replaced by someone who then denied the issue! 

I have yet another Advisor working on my case, who seems to be responsive.

I was asked to download an "iPhone Configuration Utility" to my computer, which I have done.  The tech asked me to do the following: 1) hook my phone up to the computer as soon as Mail stopped pushing; 2) send a few test emails to myself while the phone was hooked up to the computer; 3) document the date & time; 4) save the "logs" as a document; 5) email the document/logs to him.

I have done all of the above, and now I am waiting to hear from Apple.  Supposedly, the logs should show them when the phone stopped pushing - and maybe why or what caused it.

I will post again when I hear something.

I'm gonna try this Hotmail suggestion.  I'm doubtful it'll work, but I'll be happy to be wrong, if I get at least a temporary fix pending meaningful and effective problem-solving from St. Steve's Basilica in Cupertino.  I like to tell others about the wonderful Apple ecosystem, but at present I'm stuck telling 'em that, well, there are issues, but the new screen sure looks nice.

Apple's response to this, and their support efforts in general, are not up to historic standards, it seems.  I've never been a frequent user of their support services, but when I needed 'em, they were both available and capable.  Now they're difficult to reach, seemingly ignorant of major issues, and reluctant to act aggressively to fix the problem.  Did they just hire a bunch of folks from Redmond?

Memo to VP, Customer Service: This is the sort of service one typically associates with second-rate companies advertised on late-night TV.  Very, very un-Apple.  And as a biologist, I can assure you, a vacated niche will be filled by a competitor.  Regaining it will require displacement of the new occupant.  Ask someone who's dealt with New York apartment rentals what that's like.

@ACC7--

Please do let us know re outcome.

Don't bother with Hotmail.  This is not Apple's fault, of course, but basic Hotmail is still stuck with POP.  This means your basic Hotmail will be useless with your Mac Mail app (not so, though, with your iOS Mail app).  To get around Hotmail's shortcomings, for a little while I used a product named "mBox Mail for Mac" in order to make all my Hotmail folders visible and duly populated in Mac Mail.  But then, lo and behold, new messages landing in my Inbox kept disappearing from sight.  Horrible.  So I let mBox Mail go and I guess it was worth paying their subscription fee ($20 or $30 I think) because it allowed me to transfer all my Hotmail messages from their server to iCloud after I joined Mail in iCloud and got my new @me.com.  That said, Push seemed to work fine then, if I recall.

About Apple's public response to this problem, it's on a par with their silence about the disastrous iTunes Match exercise.  To be sure, I trust that this Push business will be dealt with soon.  But iTunes Match, a paid service, failed for many users on a much larger scale than mail Push.  My understanding is that many users were not given a refund, no matter how much they kicked and screamed.

Apple's corporate mandate of eerie silence may have to soon be put to rest.  It is disturbing and unsustainable. I fear the company has grown too big and unmanageable.  Everything that goes up will eventually come down.  But this is the pessimist in me and I hope and want to be proven wrong.

How about we stop cluttering this discussion with useless information and suggestions for alternate apps.

The facts are PUSH does not work.

It matters not if you used MobileMe, Migrated to iCloud or not.

This is simply a bug with iOS. Exchange Push worked from Version 3 forward, now it is broken.

This has nothing to do with Pop or IMAP, as those have no mechanism to push mail, so you must rely on the Scheduled “Pull”

The only hope any idiot at Apple could hope was configuration of another account would make some magic hidden switch in iOS change to force push to work.

It is also a problem that Apple deprecates downgrading, so there is no way to go back.

If this is an actual bug with iOS and not a server issue, then it looks like it might take until iOS 6. Waiting is the only thing we can do since it seems like so many different configurations, upgrades, not upgrades, etc have this problem. The fact that it's intermittent makes it so much more difficult to fix.

When this is the case with a Corporate Exchange Server, Google Apps Mail and the others listed, the only common denomiator is iOS.

Not to be rude, Mr. Rockstar, but what non-useless information did you add?  Are the electrons costing you extra?  If someone finds something they think worked, or something that was supposed to work that did not, perhaps others might find it helpful, nice, or even useful to hear about it, would you agree?

Sorry if you don't find the discussion herein useful.  I was at the least cheered to discover I wasn't nuts.  And if it takes a seemingly idiotic idea to get things to work for a whirl, I'm game.

And BTW, do we know that it's a pure "push" problem?  Messages making it to my device only to disappear in front of my eyes--is that a push issue, or something different, perhaps more pernicious or pervasive?  Please don't clutter things up with simple statements of fact.  Esp. if they may not be established fact.  Given that there's no widely recognized fix, I suspect that we may not know the full extent of the problem.

What I know:

• It is not JUST iCloud
• It is not just MobileMe users that migrated to iCloud
• The same lack of push happens on:
  • Exchange 2007
  • Exchange 2010
  • Google Apps Mail, configured with Exchange Connector

My point was to the Hotmail fix. Pop or IMAP CANNOT PUSH. POP and IMAP have to be scheduled or manual pull. There is no service side way for POP or IMAP to do the push.

Hence the Hotmail 'fix' is complete nonsense.

I am not her to challenge anyones technical expertise, except the lack there of from Apple.
Autodeletion is once again a push function, as the server things the message was flagged as deleted on another client, web, or device.

I was adding to this dicussion giving factual information, not happenstance in configuration of POP Accounts, WHICH CANT PUSH!

Either way, fact is, it is an Apple issue, as it lies across numerous service providers.

As I type this push has started working again, so as indicated, sometimes it may work, sometimes it may not.

My problem with most forums are the "me too" responses that bring nothing but more chatter that is useless. That is much like every MCP commenting on a problem on a MS forum giving you a Article number, no link, and closing the discussion.

It seems you may know about the inner workings of these things than I.  I do know that POP/IMAP don't push.  I don't know whether it's at all possible that having another account present and enabled might somehow affect things.  I had only my me.com iCloud account on my iPad and iPhone. 

Is it true that it's a "push function" when mail is auto-deleted, or is it merely something that happens concomitantly?  My coffee maker starts every morning when I get out of bed, but not because I get out of bed.  It's possible on any given morning that one or both could go wrong, but it's not true that they are intrinsic to each other, even though they're obviously related.

Please forgive my crankiness earlier; I understand your frustration with S/N ratio.  I would offer for consideration the comment that such is the nature of the beast.  Every open forum I've ever seen suffers from the malady.  It's also the nature of discussions about things both frustrating and incompletely understood.

Hello again all,

I've been following this thread from the beginning and I've had problems with push since upgrading to ios 5 and the problem continued when I upgraded from my iPhone 4 to the 4s. I thought I'd ask if anyone had other issues since someone mentioned emails popping up then disappearing as I also have that problem. Anyway does anyone else have problems getting mail in general? I say this because sometimes even when I open the mail app and it connects and checks for emails I still don't get them. I can log on and see the emails on my computer but it has taken up to a couple hours for them to finally show up on my iPhone. I was wondering if this is related to private browsing being turned on because when I check my email on yahoo with safari it tells me I can't unless I turn private browsing off and after I turn it off the emails that I knew I had but hadn't yet gotten on my iPhone all of a sudden start coming in?? Hope this makes sense to someone else out there. Let me know of this has happened to you

Thanks.

Mail is pushing all day, no issues. No idea if something was changed on the backend.

I have changed nothing on the phone after deletion of the accounts and re-creating. To which at the time did not fix the problem, but 3 hrs later it started working.

What worked for me to fix this problem with my iPhone 4S is to disable ALL mail "rules" I had set up at iCloud.com.  iCloud support expressly states that mail filtered by these rules will not be pushed, and I believe somehow this was affecting ALL push for my iCloud mail to my iOS device.

I removed all rules, restarted my phone, and push for Mail began working as it should.

We will see if it continues, but that short term solution worked for me.

I did not have any rules and the  problem as being there on and off since Oct

By the way it is working today but on my Mac MBP my mail account is weird today ....I think they are trying some repair modifications at Apples end.

Hello, I fixed my problem.

I casually found out that push mail wasn't working when under my home wifi network. After months not working, today just did it in 3G. So I understood that the problem was mine and not Apple's.

After some tries, I changed my DNS settings in the router configuration. They were set to Google DNS's, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I set that the router discovers the DNS servers automatically. Then, I killed the mail app from the task manager and sent a mail to try. It arrived even before it actually made the "send" tone!

Now push works flawlessly, in all situations.

So, if you happen to use Google DNS try to change that (even if you don't, some DNS may block push as I understand). Set the router to autodiscover or set any other. Restart your network and iPhone connection with your wifi, kill the mail app (I think it refresh connections) and it should work.

Hope it helps,

bye