Error in downloading mail on IMAP after ios 18 upgrade

mangalapandi wrote:

This may not be the Mail App issue, When i got new iPhone with iOS18, i got the same issue after the migration and even i deleted the account and recreated in Mail app, it did not worked. Then i have checked my server about the dovecot error log and i noticed that its had issue in keeping the authentication session and i fixed it, then Mail app started getting message and its not showed any error related to POSIX 96 till now.

This is very significant, and probably the most useful post I have seen respecting this problem! But, how did you fix it?!?

This means, ironically, apples own (discontinued) server software also won't work with iOS 18 because it runs dovecot.

mangalapandi wrote:

I have plan to reproduce this error in my server maintenance time. if i am able to reproduce it, i will update about the specific protocol error that may help apple/others to fix the issue.

But you indicated earlier that you fixed it on your dovecot server. What did you do?

mangalapandi wrote:

There are 2 error i have notice in my dovecot setup while my iPhone Mail app given POSIX 96 error...

I will have a look at my logs as soon as I have a chance. Thanks very much for your useful information and offer to help.

mangalapandi wrote:

There are 2 error i have notice in my dovecot setup while my iPhone Mail app given POSIX 96 error.

…

May be i can help you to fix if you share the truncated logs while accessing Mail app to your server.

I saw nothing interesting in IMAP logs on dovecot server. I see the login with no error, and no errors following.

Not set to debug, but I think it will be less effort to wait until Apple fixes iOS mail.

Thanks for the offer of help.

hi - just talked to Naisha in apple support. after much troubleshooting she had me delete the VPN App i had on my phone and mail started working normally.

try that if you have a VPN app on your phone.

Seems to be an issue with the Mail app using IMAP in general. Happens with gmail giving a Network error (POSIX 54). Waiting for the update to hopefully fix this as email is not usable on the iPhone Mail app.

Thanks!

That's very discouraging news. Last month I had to roll back my iPhone to 17.6.1 after ios18 was automatically installed. I've been eager to try the first round of Apple Intelligence but I'm not willing to forego the ability to access my email.

Thanks, much appreciated! I hope you will be posting here in this same thread so I’ll get a notification. i’m totally ready to move back to Mail app after a few months in Outlook where I get work email notifications in the same app…

I’ve been having the same problem. And it’s been going on for probably two years on and off. My email works just fine on my computer and my iPad but not my phone. I have a Comcast email account and sometimes I get a massive dump of emails and then other times it just says incorrect password and I can’t get anything for days. And then all of a sudden it will work for two weeks or six months and then it will happen again. Nobody can seem to fix the problem.

It's fixed! It magically started working again on both my iPhone and iPad yesterday. They must have fixed something on the back end, because I didn't do an iOS update this week and didn't change any settings.

My issue was fixed by going to IMAP settings and restyling over the greyed out forward slash after the IMAP server address.

I backed out of settings and shutdown the iPhone, and the restarted it a minute later. After the phone rebooted I went to mail and pulled down the mail to refresh it from the server. After a few seconds (which I think was the IMAP server resyncing with my mailbox, all my mail for the last few days came down. After two days it is behaving as it should with new mail appearing when it should. I note that this problem was not evident in my iPad which is iOS 17.x and not on my M2 MacBook Pro, nor on my partner’s iPad with iOS 18.1. I can only conclude that Apple can solve the mystery of this and the other issues with email that can’t be solved with this fix.

Obi1net wrote:

Hi George. My apologies for not being clear.

Yes that greyed out slash was the one I meant. By typing over it I meant that I typed a slash to replace the one that was greyed out so that it was black as other text appears when you use the keyboard. It fixed my problem after I did this and rebooted. The exact solution was needed a few days later but so far the fix stuck this time. Sadly I think this is just one symptom of other issues.

Thanks very much for the crystal clear reply.

I was having the same issue all day on the Mail iOS app with both of my Gmail accounts. I then realized I was connected to a VPN on my phone so I disconnected it and it immediately fixed the email issues!

Maurice_HJ wrote:

I have exactly the same problem.

Tried to fix this, not sure but it might have to do with the certificates being self signed with dovecot.

I wondered about that. I do use self-signed certificates on my postfix server.

Thanks. This is good information. Yours is a much newer version of Dovecot than mine. Considering that and the fact that you are using certificates signed by a recognized authority further narrows the possibilities.

When my last post was upvoted I received an email saying that this thread has been viewed 24988 times. Clearly this is a widespread problem.