IMAP email account greyed out after iOS 11 upgrade

As you can also look a the server side and are also using cyrus imap:

• Is it in your case also actually a frontend in front of another cyrus imap server (backend) ?
• Do you also see the errors I posted? ("Oct 11, 2017 2:58 AMin response to growlerrr") ?

Tnx

Someone needs to take the time to provide feedback to Apple about this issue. Posting here is not going to help, since this is a user to user support forum, and Apple does not participate here. Use this link, http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html and report the issue.

I have a Comcast/Xfinity IMAP account and have not experienced a problem. If this is an issue, then Apple needs to be made aware.

I am a Network Administrator for my organization and ran into this problem, as well as not being able to add our Exchange account to Mail for new users. I found that our SSL certificate on our Exchange Server was signed by a Certificate Authority (CA) that was listed on Apple’s list of trusted root CAs but the serial number the CA used to sign this cert was not listed. If you use a big provider like GMail, this probably isn’t related. If your organization hosts their own email server, keep reading.

First, access the certificate to your mail server by typing the address (mail.example.com) in your web browser. In Chrome you can right-click the page Inspect > Security (tab) to view the SSL certificate. Look for the serial number used by the CA and compare it to Apple’s list of Trusted CAs here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204132

If your Serial number isn’t present on their list, it’s likely that the certificate on your Exchange Server just needs to be updated to use SHA256 or greater and signed by one of the CAs in that list. Hope those helps.

Yep - exactly the same issue with 2 imap accounts configured on the device (6S) with 11.0.1 installed.

My IMAP is not to large provider like Gmail, MS etc but to a smaller IMAP provider.

The phone seems to know there is an email - I just cannot click on the account to get into the inbox/folders (it's light gray per the OP).

Did so, including the offer to assist in troubleshooting on the server side, with accounts to reproduce should Apple need any -- since I occasionally patch/enhance Cyrus IMAP, and run the tech. dep. of the IMAP service in question, I think I'm eligible to assist should Apple feel finally feel the need to address this issue.

Just to clarify my situation:

I have 2 imap accounts to the same smaller IMAP provider.

I can get email for 1 of my accounts by pressing hard on the mail app - which then presents a submenu and you can get into your email from there. However, I cannot get the 2nd email. So email is definitely being received in the background.

As such I'm not convinced it relates to the IMAP protocol per se as the email is received. It's like the app locks the interface while processing but then never unlocks it.

Interesting information. I have no issue with my Comcast IMAP account, so I wonder why this happens. Since you cannot seem to remove the mail account, have you tried creating a backup of the phone, then restoring it to factory not to the backup, and adding the account to that restored phone to see if that works? The other poster makes the comment about forcing the mail to check. I'm not sure by reading, but is this also a problem with fetching mail as well as checking manually? If you go to Settings>Accounts & Passwords, can you turn the account off from there? Have you tried resetting all settings?

We have the same issue, with all our users.

The email account is greyed out after upgrade to iOS 11(.0.2)

Everything was working fine before the upgrade.

iOS 11 is doing something different.

A quick note of my findings...

As we don't use an official certificate, I added our CA as trusted CA on my iPhone, but that did not solve anything.

Than I toke a look at the server-side. Our situation is like this (a bit more technical here, and not easy to explain in a language that is not mine, but it might be relevant):

The imap-server I connect to, "imap.company.com" is a cyrus imap server.

In fact, it is a frontend for 2 imap backends ("imap-user.company.com" which stores the regular user mailboxes and "imap-shared.company.com" on which we store shared mailboxes).
If I configure the mailaccount on my iPhone with iOS11 to use as incoming mailserver directly the backend "imap-user.company.com", I do not have the "greyed-out" issue (but I cannot read the mail in the shared mailboxes).

Neither do I have an issue when I connect it to the other backend imapserver "imap-shared.company.com".

But connecting to the frontent "imap.company.com" makes the account become greyed out in iOS 11.

For the connections from a iPhone with iOS 11, I see these messages appearing in the logging on the "imap.company.com" imap-server:

...

Oct 11 10:29:40 imap cyrus/imaps[25800]: IOERROR: opening index user.username: System I/O error

Oct 11 10:29:40 imap cyrus/imaps[25800]: IOERROR: opening index user.username.Trash: Archive I/O error

Oct 11 10:29:40 imap cyrus/imaps[25800]: IOERROR: opening index user.username.Trash: Deleted Messages I/O error

Oct 11 10:29:40 imap cyrus/imaps[25800]: IOERROR: opening index user.username.Trash: Sent Messages I/O error

...

What is the Mail app trying to do here that it did not try in previous versions?

I toke another 5 minutes to look at it after clearing my head.

Still not sure if this has something to do with the issue, but anyway...

The message "IOERROR: opening index user.username.Trash: Sent Messages I/O error" appears after the Mail app submits the command:

"4 LIST "" "*" RETURN (SPECIAL-USE STATUS (UNSEEN))"

The Mail app receives the reply:

LIST (\Noinferiors \Noselect) "." INBOX

* LIST (\Noselect \HasNoChildren) "." Archive

* LIST (\Noselect \HasChildren) "." Archives

* LIST (\Noselect \HasNoChildren) "." Archives.2016

* LIST (\Noselect \HasNoChildren) "." Archives.2017

...

4 OK Completed (10.470 secs 8050 calls)

Suppressing the LIST-STATUS function in the cyrus-imapd configuration seems to resolve the issue:

https://blogs.kolabnow.com/2017/11/07/ios-imap-connection-issues-resolved

Note that this must be performed by the IMAP server operator. There is nothing the end-user can do if they are experiencing this issue other than to talk to their IMAP provider (and to possibly use a third-party IMAP client such as Spark).

The exact setting for /etc/imapd.conf is as follows:

suppress_capabilities: LIST-STATUS

NOTE this will only be required for Cyrus IMAP Murder topologies -- single-node IMAP environments (and those proxied by, say, NGINX) are fine.

I encountered this issue, too, have it still. But what is weird, on iPhone only. I have an iPad, too, the same settings, the same provider, works fine. It's just iPhone that shows the greyed inbox. The iPhone can talk to mail server, I see the messages coming in, so the settings are right, just can't see content on that device. (my iPhone is 7, iPad is 10.5 Pro, both on iOS 11.2)

Same here on my iphone 7! My IMAP is provided by my university. It is dimmed, I cannot click on the account to check emails, although it shows the number of new emails there.