Email slow to load in mail app with iOS 11

Since it sounds like you have access to the certificate authority or a domain server, try the "To export root certification authority certificate" section in the article below. Otherwise the best answer is probably to ask your IT department or e-mail provider if they can provide it for you.

Save the exported file (just the certificate, not any keys) and e-mail it to yourself, or post on a file sharing site and e-mail the link to yourself.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd261928.aspx

My IT guy dealt with it for me, it’s a root cert if that helps? Unfortunately I’m in the UK and it’s nearly midnight so I can’t ask him. If you have trouble and can’t Find the answer on the forum let me know and I will ask tomorrow and post. 👍

Thanks Rygorr!!! I was able to export the root certification authority certificate following the instructions in that link. I think it may have fixed my iOS 11.0.2 slowwww Mail app, but there's still a lot of data for it to sync since I stupidly followed Apple Care's advice of deleting my Exchange Mail account. Guess I'll know more tomorrow...

I can report that is it seems much better after going thru the wacky certificate process. Some new emails still display LOADING, but so far none have been longer than 10 secs. Before it was easily a minute or more. I'll know better tomorrow after the sync is complete...

So my iPhone 6s with 11.0.3 has had all night to sync with Exchange after deleting/recreating my Exchange email account as per Apple's suggestion (tip: do NOT delete/recreate your account - total waste of time!). I just received an email for an online order: the preview was immediately available, but the body of the email took about 15 secs to display. So it is much better after doing the "certificate crap", but 11.0.3 has definitely made Mail much slower than 10.x. So much for iOS updates 😟 I've learned my lesson and will never be an early adopter again - thanks Apple!

So I spoke too soon - I received some email a little while ago and each took over 2 agonizing minutes to get past the stupid LOADING message and display the short text messages. Arghhh - Apple please FIX this yesterday! As you can tell from this post alone there are HUNDREDS of affected users. I'm sure there are many THOUSANDS more than have posted elsewhere, or not posted yet...

Yes I concur- it’s a lot better with the certificate but sometimes it goes back to agonisingly slow “open email body” even when the content is small. I think I’ve noticed this more today as I’ve been out and about on mobile connectivity rather than Wi-fi but have 5 bars and a 4G connection. I ran a speed test on the mobile network and it said about 5Mbps when the mail app was trying (forever) to open the email body.

So my feeling is it is still broke, less broke now the certificates are in place but broke is broke !

Fix it please Applr

I also noticed that Mail is very delayed in announcing emails sent by my VIPs - minutes after the preview shows the email I might get the custom sound play for my VIPs. Clearly Apple has severely crippled Mail for Exchange (and other?) accounts!

Same problem here.

***, Apple? Clearly there’s a bug. Either your QA failed to catch it. Or you decided to ship with a known serious bug.

Fix it. And roll out a release. Prove that you care about your customers.

All the advertising dollars in the world can’t undo the anger of businessmen and businesswomen who have to suffer wasting 30 or 45 seconds to open each new email.

Apple’s reputation is tarnished. And your silence on this gives the impression that Apple doesn’t care about quality anymore.

Tom

Hi all

Since upgrading to iOS 11 I have the same problems as everyone else with Yahoo Mail and slow loading in the Mail Client. The message at the box always says 'Checking for Mail' and it often removes all emails and then re-downloads/re-syncs them again. This has happened a couple of times now. This is very frustrating and updating with 11.0.1, 2 or 3 hasn't fixed it. Apple please fix this! Don't get me started on the rubbish notifications system and the random restarts! iPhone 6S here.

And how totally stupid of Apple to not hire some staff to monitor their own forums! Would it be that expensive to have a team that worked in these forums? Maybe they could learn of new bugs, like this one, and pass on to the development team. Get it logged into their bug database etc. Apple - be proactive, be smart - start providing assistance in your own forums!!!

I agree that there's definitely an unwelcome change to the way that the Mail app accesses folders over IMAP. I wish Apple wouldn't roll out these changes without more significant testing.

Here, one reason for the slowness seems to be that the Mail app now polls every single folder accessible to an IMAP account (either just sloppily or because of some background spyware-slash-"helpful"-AI that can't be shut off). I was able to speed up the actual performance of the Mail app in 11.0.3 by reconfiguring my IMAP server to show the phone fewer (and smaller) mail folders.

I agree that this is a very disappointing release from Apple. It's one thing to search for new folders, particularly if the main screen is refreshed. It's another to needlessly review every single folder every time a single folder's mail is checked. It strikes me as extremely sloppy, immature functional design.

I'd be very surprised if Apple isn't monitoring these forums. But the technical people doing so may not be charged with responding, since a response would have to be carefully worded for legal and marketing purposes.

When I called into Apple Care recently about this issue of slow Mail, I told them about this post in THEIR forum. The tech wasn't interested at all, and said they don't monitor posts for bugs and the like 🤔 Arrogance, stupidity or both?

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.