iPhone "hanging email" problem resolved

August 18, 2008
John Koetsier
news

I love my iPhone, but it is not without its warts.

One of them, unfortunately, is an extremely annoying “hanging email” issue: you want to check your email, the Mail app checks for mail … and never, ever finds any, or stops.

This was happening for the past week, so I decided to delete my email accounts (easy enough and unproblematic when they’re IMAP) and re-create them. No lunch.

Finally today I found this article on FreeIphoner.com, where an improbably-named “Fred Bloggs” posted this:

go into the email app, watch it sit there ‘checking for mail’ and just hold down the main/home button for 6 seconds.

shuts the app down. problem solved.

I had the same issue

I knew how to shut down misbehaving apps, but never connected the never-connecting email with a hung app … particularly after a number of recharge and sleep cycles.

   

5 CommentsLeave a comment

  • Thank you! Big help, I continue to have the “hanging email” issue on a regular basis. Was hoping that 2.0.2 would solve the problem, but no such luck. this is a much better short term fix than rebooting the phone.

  • This fixed the problem for some other guy (on a different blog) and it worked for me too. Try this out:

    — On the iPhone, delete all e-mail accounts.

    — Reset the iPhone’s network settings (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings).

    — Disable Wi-Fi (some e-mail accounts don’t work properly if set up the first time with Wi-Fi in use, he explained).

    — On the iPhone, manually re-add the e-mail accounts. (When setting up my sbcglobal.net e-mail account, which is now an AT&T Yahoo service, I was advised to choose Yahoo as the service provider.)

    — Disable e-mail syncing with iTunes.

  • Thanks for the comment. That’s a pretty radical solution, and somewhat painful … but that’s essentially what I did too.

    I also disabled email syncing – I had a nasty suspicion that it was causing issues as well.

  • I tried holding down the Home button, and it does shut down the app. I’ll try it next time the email hangs to see if it clears it up. Also, if you happen to have jailbroken your iPhone, using BossPrefs you can quickly turn off your email accounts. Wait a moment, turn them back on, then exit. This fixes the hanging issue for me. Please, everybody post this issue on the Apple iPhone forums — otherwise they won’t listen to our pleas.