Error in downloading mail on IMAP after ios 18 upgrade

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.

plinss wrote:

Those here running their own server, I'd like to hear what your folder separator is set to. If you change it to anything else, I expect your connection problems will go away.

Thank you. This is very interesting. How would I find the separator that my Dovecot installation is using? I don't see the option in dovecot.conf.

Thank you for the very helpful advice, Plinss. It has provided some quite useful background information for resolution options for iOS 18.x users. I can understand how many users would be confused about the issue, and it may well be that in many cases the problem is not directly an Apple fault and could be attributed to various server configurations around the world. Nonetheless, the problem has clearly arisen in the main part since the ios 18 update. If it means that Apple needs to accommodate a wide range of mail configurations in its updates, then surely that needs addressing. It should not be the responsibility of individual users to resolve issues arising from product updates. Australia has quite strong legislation relating to products and services that are not fit for purpose and it may well be that this situation is approaching a tipping point where this problem will trigger some action.

Thanks for the information. I'm going to dig into it a bit more later on but for now, here's my namespace section. I've been using the same config for years and forgot how/why it was initially set up this way. It's always worked great in macOS Mail, Thunderbird, and Roundcube webmail.

The entire namespace inbox section in 10-mail.conf is actually commented out on my install.

# NOTE: Assumes "namespace inbox" has been defined in 10-mail.conf.
namespace inbox {
  # These mailboxes are widely used and could perhaps be created automatically:
  mailbox Drafts {
    auto = subscribe
    special_use = \Drafts
  }
  mailbox Junk {
    auto = subscribe
    special_use = \Junk
  }
  mailbox Trash {
    auto = subscribe
    special_use = \Trash
  }

  # For \Sent mailboxes there are two widely used names. We'll mark both of
  # them as \Sent. User typically deletes one of them if duplicates are created.
  mailbox Sent {
    auto = subscribe
    special_use = \Sent
  }
  mailbox "Sent Messages" {
    special_use = \Sent
  }

Taco Bob wrote:

…

The entire namespace inbox section in 10-mail.conf is actually commented out on my install.

…

I don't think what you excerpted is commented out, and also, this is not the section that defines the separator.