Email slow to load in mail app with iOS 11

Remove your email account and set it up again

1. On your computer, sign in to your email provider’s website. Make sure that all of your email is there or make sure that your email is saved somewhere other than your iOS device.
2. On your iOS device, go to Settings > Mail > Accounts.
3. Tap the email account that you want to remove.
4. Tap Delete Account.
5. Add your account again.

This may not help with Gmail, but we’ve noticed that trusting the certificate for the certificate authority (if not already a trusted public CA — internal CA for example) that issued the Exchange server certificate seems to help with this issue. To do this, install the certificate (send it via email and open or put on a website for download) then set it as trusted under Settings\General\About\Certificate Trust Settings). With IOS11 it seems you can no longer add an Exchange account on a server that has a certificate that is not trusted.

I took the Advice of an earlier writer and stopped using the Apple Mail app, after taking my phone in and had it tested by an Apple certified dealer that it was not my phine, I then went into my email provider and they did their own And they assured me it was not their servers, I then spoke with my work IT people and they came to the same conclusion as everyone else it was the Apple Mail app they feel that the 11 updates and later are no longer working with my Microsoft exchange server 2007 I abandoned the Microsoft mail app and went to outlook for Apple and my mail is 100% fine coming in faster than ever my home mail still works on the Apple Mail app but my exchange is now on the Outlook app

Hi ! I had the same problem with emails content extremely slow to load from exchange server after updating my iphone 7 to iOS 11.0. Today, I updated to 11.0.1 and everything went back to fast and smooth again. Hope this will help you too...

You will need to do it on the server; I don't see a way in Mail to tell the app to process fewer folders. If all else fails, you can just delete unused folders on the server (after backing them up somewhere else in a sort of manual archival process).

That's probably not at all helpful for most people using public or company mail servers. I was able to discover this only because I run my own IMAP server. While the Mail app was displaying "Checking mail" for 30 seconds or longer, the server was busily reading (at the app's direction) the full text of every IMAP folder accessible to it. It's probably some immaturely designed feature that's driving those requests -- maybe predictive filing of mail in folders (that is, the Mail app's ability to suggest what folder to save a piece of mail), or something along those lines, but there should at least be a way to turn that off, particularly for people with lots of mail. A full-featured email app would let you ignore certain folders on the server entirely, as you're requesting; many of the third-party mail apps are configurable in that way.

I can confirm, though, that this fix does seem to totally address the problem for me. Showing the Mail app 2.5 GB of mail instead of 40 GB of mail fully solved the problem (as the server's able to process 2.5 GB of mail in a second or two, rather than 30 or 40).

It's not just Apple, of course, but I see more and more of these sloppily designed features, as if the people who are creating them have little perspective and little experience considering the variety of real-world use cases that they're trying to address. Windows, of course, has many similar problems today. Very little seems like a mature, well-tested software product anymore.

OK its much better with the certificate on the phone but still can be slow, so I took some other advice from this thread and downloaded Outlook for iPhone, selected "not Office 365" and did the advanced setup with the same details the iPhone's mail is using. Chalk and cheese 🙂. You can open the body message for any mail instantly on Outlook and then try the same thing with the iPhone's mail app and wait and wait....

Since loading the certificate, it has been much quicker for me but when I get out of range of WiFi, even when I'm on 4G with loads of bars [and can prove I have fast access on 4G with Net Analyzer] its as if the iPhone's email app has not picked up the new route and I'm back to waiting and waiting...

No problem though with Outlook, so it looks like the Apple mail app is still the issue.

Ok, I finally figured a method that worked, at least for me. This is based on the intuition I had, the way IOS 11 does indexing of data (emails) and how it deals with data that were sitting pre-upgarde and what it does with them post upgrade. They must have some bugs/performance issues in this area and I bet they never stress tested this to the extend folks are running into issues.

All I did was deleted all my accounts and added them back, vola, the performance returned back. The reason is that, when new data gets populated, indexing (or new storage format) kicks in and writes them in a new format that is optimized while if you had older email boxes IOS 11 probably has performance issues dealing with two formats.

net-net, remove accounts and add them back to avoid un-bearable slowness.

I agree. The best course of action is either start using outlook or as in my case I have outlook and yahoo accounts so I had to go back IOS email app but deleted the accounts and added them back (so the indexing or wherever the bugs are with handling old data went away, BTW, I also deleted the email app and added it back because I saw some residual data sitting when I looked at iphone storage usage -- probably another bug with leaky "buckets").

Well said! The only issue I encountered in switching from Mail to Outlook for iOS was that Outlook doesn’t support sub folders in Contacts. Not sure why they did that, as folders are the norm for organizing in the rest of the IT world. Plus, Outlook for Windows supports Contact sub folders. Anyway, I used the category feature to organize my contacts, then moved them all into the main Contacts folder so Outlook for iOS could “see them”. Other than that, it’s been a painless experience moving to Outlook for IOS! And guess what - Outlook retrieves and displays messages nearly instantaneously. Unlike Apple’s latest Mail under iOS 11.x. It’s like comparing apples to oranges 😺

It's affecting a LOT more than just Yahoo email (who uses that anyway?). I believe there are many that posted here about issues with MS Exchange email accounts that experience the dreaded "Loading..." message for an eternity (minutes) after clicking on a preview of a message to see the entire message body. Using Outlook for iOS, my Exchanged based emails now display nearly instantly, as I was used to with the Apple Mail app up until iOS 11.x got installed.

Hiding the “Unread” folder (if it is showing on the left navigation pane) and marking all existing mail as “Read” fixed mine and a few colleagues of mine and the issue has not returned. It’s worth a try. Not making any argument for Apple’s

Mail app but my company’s MDM policy doesn’t allow Outlook mobile. Let me know if it works for you I am interested to know. You should do this for all Mail accounts using the app and then restart Mail.

I found a fix!!! Go to App Store download outlook and choose your product exchange microsoft etc delete old account off the mail settings in iPhone where you first set up your email use the mail through the app works super fast

Hello All, sorry for my Bad English. There is Solution for Exchange

1.) On Exchange server - start - MMC - add snap-in Certification - Computer Accounts

2.) Export your root CA-server Certificat to .cer file (without Personal key)

3.) Export your Certificat for IIS Exchange (you have to find from IIS Manager - SBS WEB Application)

4.) Send per email you Root .cer Files to iPhone, open and install it

5.)Go iPhone Setting - About - Certification Trust - Enable Full Trust for your root Certificate

6.) send per email you Exchange Certificat - open and install

Its works for me ;-)

You will need to get the certificate sent from your exchange (mentioned on other post). Then open up in the iOS mail app, install and go into certificates (settings,about,at the bottom of the list is certificates) then slide the on switch.

Your emails will be quick again. Why apple hasn’t got a clue about this is beyond belief!! And as yet no reason why we now need to go through this process with exchange 2007. Apple needs to get their act together if they want to sell us products at premium prices.

I give up on Apple. Clearly they either don't care about business users, or are for whatever reason unable to fix this bug in a timely way. I suppose they think that we're willing to sit for a cumulative fifteen or twenty minutes a day waiting for each email we open to populate.

I have installed the free Microsoft Outlook app on my iPhone. It was painless and doesn't have the problem this thread discusses. It's interface is almost identical to Apple's, so it was no trouble to learn. And frankly, I like some of it's features more than Apple's iPhone email app.

Glad to be done wasting my time waiting for Apple to fix this problem or even simply acknowledge it!

Good riddance.

Life's too short, and we're all to busy to suffer because a vendor is fails on their promise to respect their customers.