Mail not working on iPhone after iOS 18 Update

I reset my phone to factory setting. Reinstalled all the apps......and it still does not work. Can Apple please give me a downgrade of the IOS? I promise I will not touch IOS 18 ever again. I promise. please.....pretty please.

I run a IMAP server with cyrus imapd for a small number of people. Two upgraded to iOS 18 and both do not see new mail arriving in their accounts. They still see the messages from before the upgrade to iOS 18. There are no errors shown on the client and there are no errors in the server logs. In the server logs I can see that the iOS 18 clients authenticate successfully to the IMAP server and that they are accessing their IMAP INBOX Send Items and Trash mailboxes (i.e. asking for a list of the messages that are in these mailboxs). When they send a mail, the send mail is stored in the send items correctly. However other IMAP operations like flagging or moving existing messages result in weird behaviour like making those messages disappear on the client.

This does not look like an authentication or TLS issue at all, something is going wrong in the interaction between iOS 18 mail client and the IMAP server. Nothing changed on the imap server, so Apple changed something that made this happen. This is very a frustrating issues for users, some of them use the iPhone/iPad as their primary means of interacting with their email.

Yep. There is something wrong with the Mail app. Here's my backstory:

Before posting my suggested solution, I spent around two hours Wednesday (Sept 18) on a tech support call with senior Apple advisor regarding this issue. Eventually they had me install MS Outlook. We successfully connected to my mail server using Outlook.

The Apple senior advisor said that if I could get the screen shots and application logs uploaded to them, he might be able to get back to me by Tuesday (Sept 24), because he was out of the office on Monday (Sept 23). The advisor was personable and pleasant. I have nothing against him personally. Nevertheless, he was not empowered adequately to resolve my issue or escalate it in a timely manner. So, I'm throwing Apple as a company under the bus for creating a problem with the Mail app they could not resolve for me or others.

I could not wait to resolve the issue. I am no fan of MS Outlook. So, I looked to other third-party mail apps.

Moving off of Apple Mail to a third-party mail app is a viable solution when:

• Your business email accounts are dead in the water because of the issue
• Apple support is unacceptably slow to respond to the issue
• Apple's time to market with an updated release that fixes the issue is unknown
• Perceptions of many long-time users are that the overall stability is in question
• Other available solutions work

Any news when is it going to be fixed? My work email is not downloading on the phone. Should I change something? Up to the update everything worked fine….

Try changing authentication to password instead of NTLM 

Worked for me .

jacques

After working with a rep, I was able to resolve. Here is what I did:

Deleted the mail app

Reinstalled from the app store

After that, went to Settings > Apps > Mail > Accounts 

Enabled mail for all accounts 

Restarted the phone.

Still not working after that, so then I deleted the email account and re-added it. Mail then began working.

For anyone still not getting emails since the iOS18 update I managed to figure it out if you’re on Hotmail. Delete it and re add an account. It used to be under “other” option. But I tried it through the outlook option. Which I didn’t think Hotmail/live account was. Then it worked! I’m back online. Seems the update changed things that were not broken for some. Apple did it again!

iOS 18.0.1 does not fix this issue. :(

ios18.1 b2 is same. Not solved on my iPad.

MrHoffman wrote:

I’d think that a mail server not minimally offering TLSv1.2 and forward security would be a more interesting question to investigate and potentially address, …

And for completeness, this may be a bug in the iPhone mail client, too.

——-

Appears that at least for my server, checktls and several other online tls and Mx testers all say TLS works and 1.2 is available and functioning…. One service griped about the sectigo certificate and was looking for the intermediate, but it finished the TLS tunnel and reported all was well. Meanwhile, the mail app on my macOS machines are happily chugging new mail off this server…. So we can stop blaming the mail server.

The only place where this IMAP issue is happening for me is in iOS and iPadOS 18.0 mail app clients. And looking at the server log, it looks like the mail app just decides to go silent and doesn’t even begin negotiating the mail list at all. (I’m not posting the log file…. Too much to redact there)

[Edited by Moderator]

I confirm. Adding / doesn't fix that issue.

I am having exactly the same issue. Since Tuesday I haven't received any emails. I followed some of the advice in here about deleting the email account, restarting then adding the email account. It hasn't helped at all.

I went to my nearest Apple store (Brent Cross in London) and the Apple person I spoke to said he'd never heard of the issue and sent me on my way.

Same here. Can send, and message DOES reach recipient, but all IMAP folders stay empty (except for that one message going into the "Sent" folder). Btw, that Sent folder seems NOT to be synchronized with the IMAP server, and is eventually lost (the Sent folder disappears after refreshing folder list). So there must be a bug, probably in the Mail App, probably IMAP only (as SMPTS worked fine). Very frustrating, for me and so many others, and unbelievable that it has not been fixed yet.

I have the same issue with my work email. Same error message.

also, other emails do not load properly. Keeps flashing between downloading and email updated. I have to wait a couple minutes for everything to load.

Pretty frustrating. Would like to undo the update for now if I could.

NickAleshgo wrote:

• Here

TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are being deprecated due to security concerns: 

Security vulnerabilities

• TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are vulnerable to a number of attacks, including POODLE, BEAST, CRIME, FREAK, and LOGJAM. These attacks can compromise encrypted communications and expose valuable data. 

• Compliance requirements

• Many organizations, including government agencies, must meet compliance requirements that mandate the use of TLS 1.2 or higher. 

• Evolving standards

• Internet standards and regulatory bodies are evolving to provide improved security. 

• Here are some details about the deprecation of TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1: 

Windows

• TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will be disabled by default in Windows 11 Insiders Preview and Windows Server Insiders Preview releases in 2024. This change applies to both client and server devices. 

• Azure

• Azure will remove support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 for new and existing storage accounts by October 31, 2024. 

• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

• The IETF officially deprecated TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 in March 2021. The IETF recommends that companies, government agencies, and software developers use TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. 

While that is good info for people, This imap failure on the mail app on iOS and iPadOS 18 is happening on servers that use TLS 1.2 and 1.3