iPad mail app displays blank screen, then crashes

Hi A436,

Thank you for contributing to the Apple Support Communities.

If you only see a blank screen in Mail, and then the app quits, try removing and re-adding your mail accounts from Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

You can use these steps from Get help with Mail on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch:

1. Tap Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
2. Tap the affected email account.
3. Tap Delete Account.
4. Add your account again.

If the Mail app still quits unexpectedly after this step, you may need to back up your iPad and restore the iOS software:

Use iTunes to restore your iOS device to factory settings - Apple Support

Sincerely,

Jeremy

Try this:

Put the iPad in airplane mode, open the mail app while still in airplane mode then turn off airplane mode & see if your emails load.

Regarding a blank iPad Mail screen upon launch with subsequent crash of the app. . .

I don't know why there isn't more documentation on this, but this may help. I had this EXACT same issue. I'd open my Mail app on my iPad mini, a blank screen would open and then after around 3 seconds the screen would go black.

I thought I had tried everything including:

1. Soft reset of iPad - nope.
2. In preferences, deleted email account and added it back again - no luck.
3. Tried turning off airplane mode, before launching app, then turning airplane mode on. Nothing.
4. Since I use an IMAP account for my email, I turned that off, and created a POP account, with this idea that I was forcing too much existing mail into the APP at one time. Nope. (I had also deleted a ton of email from my IMAP account previous to this step, to no avail).
5. Deleted apps on the iPad to make sure there was enough available space for our burgeoning email account.
6. I backed up the whole iPad and did a RESTORE TO BACK-UP. No dice.

BUT, here is what we did to get it working – and the steps I'd recommend:

1. Back up the iPad just as a precaution.
2. Make sure you don't have way more email than you have available storage on your iPad.
3. Make sure you have closed iPad Mail app, by flicking it away from the multi-task bar.
4. NOW – a variation of number two above. In Preferences, instead of deleting your email account(s), simply turn Mail OFF under 'Mail, Contact, Calendars'.
5. NOW open the Mail app. It should say 'Welcome to Mail' and prompt you to set-up a new Exchange Server or 'Other', as in adding a manual account. We set this up as a POP account just to be sure to not overload the app by mirroring too many of our old emails from our IMAP account.
6. This forced the Mail app to start entirely fresh, and load the settings via the app, as opposed to through Preferences. It worked!
7. We THEN went into preferences and turned off the POP account and turned on the IMAP account.
8. Viola! Fixed.

I think we must have had a blank DRAFT email that had stalled the app somehow, that paralyzed the app, in addition to way too many unread emails. The previous steps, which did not initially work in and of themselves, still may have been helpful pre-steps, that enabled the ultimate solution. Again, our solution was setting up a 'new account' WITHIN the Mail app itself, after turning ALL mail OFF within preferences. This more effectively forced the Mail app to freshly accept the accounts as though, we had done a clean install of the app.

I hope this helps those who have faced this same issue.

did not work for me 😟

Thanks so much for helping. The fix worked where all else failed. Much appreciated.