Yahoo Mail Always Checking for Mail

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Level 1

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Yahoo Mail Always Checking for Mail

A few days ago I upgraded from my old iPhone 3G (OS4) to the new iPhone 4S (OS5). I have previously used the Yahoo Mail app to get mail on my 3G with few problems. However when I loaded the Yahoo account/app onto the phone it would not stop checking for mail. Even when I put the phone on standby and thought the mail program was off, it would keep checking in the background and thus drain the battery quickly. Also, while the mail was constantly checking, the phone would not send outgoing email. The problem also stalled any other email accounts I had installed (like gmail) and would not let them download either. The problem was somewhat random in that sometimes it would download the Inbox okay, but hang on my email folders. Sometimes it would download some of the email in the folders, but hang on the Inbox. Etc.

I spent a few days working on this issue by searching the web for solutions and spending some time with Apple Support on the phone and in the Store. After much trial and error, here are things that did not work, things that worked temporarily ( a few hours then the problem came back), and finally the one thing that seems so far (12 hours) to be permanent. I do believe the problem lies in the way the Yahoo account/app interacts with the iPhone 4S and is not exactly a outright bug, but who really knows?

Things that did not work at all:

Uninstalling and reinstalling the Yahoo account (a zillion times)

Rebooting the phone.

Reinstalling the entire OS5 of the phone.

Running the Yahoo Mail on a Apple Store phone.

Conclusion: the phone was fine; it was a Yahoo Mail problem

Things that worked temporarily:

Deleting all unnecessary emails and email folders in my Yahoo account from my computer (some forum users have reported finding "corrupt" emails that hang their systems).

In Yahoo Mail on the computer, set Options->More Options->POP&Forwarding->When POPing messages->include spam messages and add [BULK] as prefix to subject. (I previously set it to "don't POP spam" but the Yahoo mail sets up on the phone with a [BULK] (i.e. spam) folder automatically and I thought perhaps the phone was looking for the [BULK] folder on the server but wasn't allowed in by my former settings and hence got hung up).

Unfortunately, the two above solutions appeared to work at first, then several hours later the problem returned. But they gave me clues that perhaps it was something in the way the phone was searching the Yahoo server for messages and not finding something it was looking for.

The thing that finally worked so far:

On the phone->Settings->Mail,Contacts,Calendars->Mail->Preview-> set to None. (The default is 2 lines, I also tried 1 line, but the phone still hung).

By not trying to preview the email contents, the phone now seems to Check for Mail then stop after downloading anything new, both in my Inbox and all my folders. I have been testing this over the last 12 hours or so and its seems stable and my battery is not constantly draining. My tentative conclusion is that somehow the Preview feature on the 4S does not work well with the Yahoo server. (I worked fine on my old 3G, go figure).

Anyway, for me this has worked for now. Hopefully it will continue to work. I can live without Previews, but not without my mail :-)

Posted on Jan 15, 2012 7:06 AM

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Answer 1

Margthecar Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 18, 2012 7:15 PM in response to Margthecar

Well, it turns out it was not the Previews afterall. After a couple of days of smooth sailing, my phone hung up again Checking for Mail. I finally noticed a correlation between a certain type of email and the phone stalling during the email download. I subscribe to a neighborhood listserve that offers to forward community emails in two modes--Immediate and Digest--which are just like they sound. Immediate mode forwards the community emails one by one in real time as they are sent, and Digest mode accumulates about 20 emails then sends them as a bunch of attachments with sort of a "cover page" of subject titles. The Digest mode uses this archaic attachment format called EZM. My old iPhone 3G could receive the "cover page" of attachment listings of the Digest just fine, but could not open the attachments themselves. I was okay with that--I just read them when I got home on my computer.

But on the iPhone4S, the Digest mode was causing the problem of not being able to download the mail. Somehow it is incompatible with with the 4S. It took me so long to find the problem because downloading digests did not cause this probem on my iPhone 3G so I did not suspect them at first, and I did not always have a digest mode email in my inbox (they come and go) so I kept thinking my latest fix worked, only to have the problem recur a few hours or days later. I finally noticed a correspondence between the digest mode appearing in my inbox when I was downloading mail on my phone and the inability of the phone to stop Checking for Mail. When I went to my computer, deleted the digest mode email, then reloaded the Mail on my phone, the problem disappeared. I did this several times to confirm it was not a fluke.

Anyway, a change to IMMEDIATE mode has stopped the problem further confirming that it was the Digest mode format that was conflicting with something in the iPhone 4S. So if you are having this problem, look for troublesome emails with archaic/corrupted attachments. It just might be causing your problem too. BTW, at one point I had a forwarded Digest in my Sent folder, and that did not cause problems until I tried to open the Sent folder, so make sure you look in ALL your folders for suspicious emails, not just the Inbox.

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