Apple Mail app not updating from unread to read emails on iPhone

I have now updated my iphone and ipad to ios 18.3.1 but still my email doesn't work. I've removed all my email accounts except iCloud. I've sent a test email from my Mac to my iCloud account (just says "hello, how are you" -- no attachments) and it takes about 15-20 minutes before it appears on my iphone and ipad -- the little wheel just goes round and round till the email finally appears --I'm just so fed up with this. My iphone is a new one and it's now rubbish. Even iCloud mail is so slow, never mind my third party accounts (Yahoo, Microsoft).

Things I've tried: 1) removing accounts and adding them again, (2) restarting the iphone & ipad, (3) turning VPN off, (4) changing iphone mail to List View as BopCat suggested. None of these makes any difference.

Question: someone suggested that Categorising is going on in the background even when you've selected List View -- does this slow things down? Even so, the Categories/List View is only available on my iphone, not the ipad. The ipad doesn't have the Categories/List View option at all, and it's still really slow.

FishingAddict,

Do you know how to fix the “block sender” feature that got messed up, on my iPhone 13 after the iOS 18.3 update?

I had to disable Block Sender for the mail app, because it starting blocking all email addresses, including my own.

If you have not already done so, I would recommend:

• Settings > Apps > Mail > Blocked > clear every address ouf of the list until it's empty
• Settings > Apps > Mail > Blocked Sender Options > Mark Blocked Sender > OFF

If emails then still go to the Trash, you should login to your Google account using a browser and have a hard look at the "Filters and Blocked Addresses" setting (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/filters). I would recommend deleting all blocked address from there as well. And, if you have an filters listed at the top, and you didn't create them, then delete those as well.

Then, do some testing on your iPhone again to ensure that your emails are coming and going without going to the trash. I would then recommend not using the blocked feature on your iPhone Mail because that featue is fairly inefffective at blocking modern spam or scam emails. Instead, always mark every single undesirable email as "Junk" in iOS Mail. That will train the server to recognize spam and deal with them for you. The key is to keep flagging messages as Junk.

Just bought new iPhone 16 pro max phones today and now when ATT updated us to 18.3.1, a whole bunch of stuff, including email isn't working properly. Tried all the current suggestions and none of them have worked.

Thank you, FishingAddict, for your continued suggestions. I have now removed all my Blocked Senders and turned the Block Sender Option OFF. I rebooted my iphone and ipad but it hasn’t fixed the problem.

My main issue was the time taken for incoming mail to appear on my iphone and ipad — it can take up to 10 minutes. But I wondered what happens to SENT emails, so I have carried out another set of experiments.

Using the Mail App on my iphone and ipad I have sent numerous test emails from one account to another (e.g. iCloud to Outlook, Outlook to Yahoo, Yahoo to iCloud).

On my Mac I had two windows open: (1) the Mac Mail App and (2) a Safari window logged into my Outlook account.

Every single email I sent from my iphone and ipad arrived on my Mac in 4-5 seconds. Brilliant! The emails I sent to and from my Outlook account showed up almost immediately in my Outlook account in Safari. So the emails are sent very fast, so I don’t think this is a wi-fi speed issue. But of more interest here is that none of these emails showed up in either the Inbox or the Sent box on my iphone and ipad — until around 10 minutes later.

So it’s not just a delay in receiving incoming mail on the ipad/iphone, I can’t see my sent emails either! But I can see on my Mac that they were sent OK. I despair of ever getting this fixed.

P.S. I have filed a report to Apple, but no response or acknowledgement.

When I do that, switch to list view, the screen will constantly refresh moving all visible mail items down. It looks like a drop down menu being opened then closed on repeat. I cannot search or select an email. Anyone else having same issue?

Update: I just realized I was wrong. I had switched from "Categories" to "List View" and thought that had fixed it, but it actually just shows EVERYTHING. That worked fine for Yahoo, as it never had categories, but not for Gmail. It appears Apple has once again geared changes to be compatible only with their products, i.e. Apple Mail. Even shared category names like Updates, Promotions, etc. sort completely differently. So Gmail (the top email provider worldwide), Outlook, Yahoo, etc. users have no option but to change categories manually, which still won't help future/new contacts from being routed who knows where. Crazy!

Update: I just realized my prior response was wrong. The version of Yahoo I'm using has no categories, so when I switched from "Categories" to "List View" on my phone (3 dot menu at top), everything showed up under Primary and it appeared to be fixed. But when doing that in Gmail, every ad, promo, etc. you've designated to go to other inboxes shows in Primary, so NOT a fix. It appears Apple has once again geared changes to be compatible only with their products, i.e. Apple Mail. Even shared category names like Updates, Promotions, etc. sort completely differently. So Gmail (the top email provider worldwide), Outlook, Yahoo, etc. users have no option but to change categories manually, which still won't help future/new contacts from being routed who knows where. And apparently there's no way to downgrade from 18.3.1, so I can only hope they change it back with the next update (but I doubt it).

I can’t help you with the other things, but as far as the sent folder. If you disable block sender, in the mail app your emails will stay in the sent folder.

However, be prepared because all your previous email addresses that you’ve blocked will now flood your inbox 😡 and you can no longer block emails. So a bunch junk and spam mail will come into your inbox.

They’ll tell you to train your phone by sending them to the junk folder. This does not work either! I’ve sent 100’s from the same email address to junk it continue to go into my inbox.

I’m so done with Apple it’s beyond aggravating.

Thanks Pookie125. I removed all my blocked senders and turned the Block Sender to OFF about 2 weeks ago. It hasn't made any difference :-(

It's weird, different things seem to work for different people. Flakey indeed.

When I updated to 18.3 the mail would not load for about a day, then it was ok. I just updated to 18.3.1 and mail is not loading again. I hope it will resume soon.

I have same issue my emails work on cellular but not WiFi. I have tried adding accounts etc but no joy. I have no vpn etc and tried everything.

never had an issue until latest update.

please help

Does Apple have any intention of fixing it?

If you see my response below, I did all the things you suggested. It didn’t not fix the email problems