Email slow to load in mail app with iOS 11

The problem is not with your iPhone 6 hardware - it's buggy iOS 11.x from Apple. I abandoned using iOS's Mail app and switched to MS Outlook for iOS. Outlook apps pulls down emails very fast - as we're used to. Apple has some buggy code to fix in iOS 11.x 😟

I’m having the same issue. I believe the new Hand Off features are to blame.

When I’m on my MacBook, booth devices get emails fine. As soon as MacBook goes to sleep, my emails no longer load on iPhone.

I’ve turned off the handoff feature on my iPhone and it seems to of fixed the issue for me.

I have tried turning off Siri (Settings--Mail--Siri & Search) so that Mail isn't constantly being indexed. I did the same for Contacts and Calendars. Spotlight on the Mac OS had a similar issue several years ago, and turning it off helped, so I figured I'd give it a try here with Siri.

To me, it has made a significant difference, but I only did it 45 minutes ago, and I've been on one WiFi network the whole time. If others try this and spend time on LTE and a variety of WiFi networks and see a difference, let me know.

Apple’s Mail app became slowwww on my iPhone 6s ever since I upgraded its iOS from 10 to 11 a few months ago. The other day I foolishly upgraded my iPad from 10 to 11 too and guess what? Mail became so slow it was futile! So, like I did with my iPhone, I switched to Microsoft’s Outlook for iOS app and all my emails were immediately accessible! I have an Exchange account. Apple continues to have their head buried in the sand on this longstanding bug 🤔

OK, so this appears to have WORKED !!! I can‘t believe it. 🙂 It was a process to go through for sure so give yourself the time to do it and wouldn’t hurt to have apple on the phone to assist (there is one step in the process that if you make the wrong choice you will not be able to recover). Back up your phone, factory reset, restore your back up. Again, would be wise to do with Apple on the phone, between stages you can request a call back (ex. the factory reset takes time, have them assist you with the back up and reset, while it is resetting schedule a call back to assist with restoring from back up then while it is restoring the backup schedule another call back to ensure that once it has reinstalled your mail is working correctly with no lag time with mail Opening). So glad to have this fixed! Happy Saturday 🙂

Your experience and short lived joy at a problem seemingly solved, only to be frustrated yet again, is typical of the experience suffered by many Apple Mail app users on this forum since the intro of iOS 11. It has nothing to do with your hardware.

Ditch the Apple Mail App and switch to one of the many better performing alternatives. As I have mentioned many times before, Edison Mail App is terrific.

Out of desperation, I simply factory reset my iPhone, and did NOT restore it. I manually went in, and set up all my accounts, added my Apple ID, re-installed apps, and treated the device as a new one entirely. It took me well over an two hours just to get emails, contacts and calendars back.

But after close to two weeks, email is back to normal, and iTunes even stopped duplicating playlists. My wife, who got a brand new phone and migrated her data, has the problem. My antique phone is fine.

I think the core problem is perhaps somewhere in the update/upgrade process, and starting from scratch is the only thing that helped me. I've been running lean, too - just email, some news and travel apps, and one single game. But hey - I can email again without my blood pressure spiking and without it being faster to get in the car, drive to my office, check my email, and return home.

Put your device in recovery mode and set it up again

1. Make sure that you're using the latest version of iTunes.
2. If iTunes is already open, close it. Connect your device to your computer and open iTunes. If you don't have a computer, borrow one from a friend or go to an Apple Retail Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider for help.
3. While your device is connected, force restart it with these steps:
   • On an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus: Press and hold the Side and Volume Down buttons at the same time. Keep holding them until you see the recovery-mode screen.
   • On an iPhone 6s and earlier, iPad, or iPod touch: Press and hold both the Home and the Top (or Side) buttons at the same time. Keep holding them until you see the recovery-mode screen.
     
4. When you see the option to Restore or Update, choose Update. iTunes will try to reinstall iOS without erasing your data. Wait while iTunes downloads the software for your device. If the download takes more than 15 minutes and your device exits recovery mode, let the download finish, then repeat these steps.
   
5. After the Update or Restore completes, set up your device.

This is generally a good "last resort" solution and becky_s22 describes the process well. But to save everyone the trouble, we've tried this on two devices running 11.0.1 and it has not helped. Unlike some of the other posters, we use all IMAP accounts and no Exchange services whatsoever. It appears to be an as-yet unresolved bug in iOS 11, and actually, I see similar behavior in multiple apps - not just Mail (i.e., many apps are slow to load or establish network connection).

I can literally login to my Mac, fetch mail, read my email, maybe send a short message, and logout before iOS 11.0.1 has fetched new mail.

If I watch on my WiFi and see what Mail is doing on iOS while it is spinning waiting to receive Mail, the answer is - not a thing (on the network at least). I see that with Photos, iTunes, and many Apple apps.

I do not see a stall in third-party apps. The couple games I tried hits those ad servers lightning fast. So I suspect it's a big in some library or code common to all the Apple apps.

Hi Kane

Yes get your IT dept to send you a certificate then install. Beware once installed and trusted you have to follow Ryggor's advice and go into to Settings General About - then down the bottom you will find certificates go in there and you will see your certificate. you have to toggle the button next to your certificate to on(green) then you are good to go

Did you try the tip with installing your company server certificate on iPhone mentioned few posts above? I did and it worked for me like a charm. No further slow email loading issue (for both my email accounts - Exhange and Gmail). Now it works like before - very quick. Luckily I am on exchange account and was able to do it. For all those who have non-exchange mail account - no solution known yet.

Well, I finally got all aspects of Outlook for iOS working! Emails are once again nearly instantaneous in displaying the full message - just like they were when I used to use the iOS Mail app, pre iOS 11.0.3. Now I no longer have to stare at what must be the stupidest status message of all time "Loading...", which could display anywhere from 45 seconds to several minutes using the iOS built-in Mail app under iOS 11.x. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to come up with a little more, um, useful status message - that might have helped Apple debug all these woes... Anyway, no more iOS Mail app for me 🙂

After being frustrated for months and reading all your comment, I decided to do the following: I downloaded and installed outlook for iOS and it's FAST (with the exact same mail accounts)! Maybe this gets Apple going.

We gave up on Apple email more than a month ago, installing Outlook to access multiple Exchange accounts.

It worked immediately (thus pinning the bug clearly on a defect from Apple.)

We actually like Outlook on our phone more than we like Apple's email app. It's almost the same (and had almost zero learning curve) but is more polished and has a few additional features that make our work easier.

So, even when Apple fixes this problem, we won't be going back to the Apple app.

It amazes me that Apple, the third largest company in the world (Fortune 1000, 2016), has such bad QA that this bug got out the door. The only other explanation is that they KNEW about the bug and shipped the product anyway, just to make a ship date.

What amazes me even more is that Apple either doesn't know about this thread, or has chosen to stay mute on the issue, hoping it won't gain more attention. That's called treating your customers like dirt. And it's something we expect from Microsoft. However, I guess we were mistaken in thinking Apple didn't have that kind of contempt for their users.

I just marked all of my 800 emails as "read" and that did the trick. The strange part is that I have other gmail accounts on my iPhone 6s and they were working fine with higher "unread" emails. Thanks for the tip, Frogbugz.