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I may have found the culprit: damn you, Mail!

Ultra AleM

Ultra AleM

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 22, 2012
678
69
Italy
I have terrible battery life on my iPhone 5 (iOS 8.1.3). Maybe I found who's guilty: not using the phone that much, I found mail to take up to 56% of my battery in background. I don't have push mails on, it's on a 15 minutes refresh. What can I do? I have 5 addresses. Thanks a lot.

PS: low signal is not a stable condition. Just this time.
 

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Well, first thing that comes to mind is
A. Change it to fetch less often, such as hourly.
B. Use mail clients with push functionality. Such as Outlook or Mailbox (Gmail).

If it's checking for new mail every 15 minutes it has to go online and sync each of your 5 accounts. That will take a pretty big hit on the battery as you've seen. Thats 4 checks on 5 accounts, or 20 checks total per hour. Quite a lot to handle without having push notifications.
 
I only have 3 accounts, but mail is only single digit most the time. Have push on iCloud and 15 minute Fetch on rest.

Mac may be right. I would uninstall and reinstall Mail App or Restore iPhone.

Maybe first try signing out and logging in to one account at a time and see the usage per account. If you can afford to be w/o them for awhile. If you have them on home computer or work computer shouldn't be too big a deal. :)

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You don't have the new Gmail Inbox, do you. I had issues with it and uninstalled--:(
 
Are you sure low signal isn't a recurrent condition? Because it seems to be the culprit...
 
Ultra AleM said:
I have terrible battery life on my iPhone 5 (iOS 8.1.3). Maybe I found who's guilty: not using the phone that much, I found mail to take up to 56% of my battery in background. I don't have push mails on, it's on a 15 minutes refresh. What can I do? I have 5 addresses. Thanks a lot.

PS: low signal is not a stable condition. Just this time.
Click to expand...
Do you use the Mail app itself fairly often and/or for a fair bit amount of time in general? Or when you said you aren't using the phone that much you meant you barely use the Mail app to read/compose/send/organize messages too?
 
I set the mails fetch hourly.

Is this a normal result? Brightness on 90% (I am outside).

I used it for nearly 3 hours. It's not much.
 

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Op it's an iPhone 5 by your first post. Some units have faulty batteries have you checked your serial number with apples site?
 
I'd you don't mind forwarding to icloud you can set everything to forward to an icloud email (which gets narive push in the Mail app) but set it so you're still sending from whichever email you want (or you're not sending from the iCloud when you respond).

That is what I've done. Fetching drains battery unnecessarily, whoever I can't imagine even that would cause such horrible drain
 
Ultra AleM said:
I set the mails fetch hourly.

Is this a normal result? Brightness on 90% (I am outside).

I used it for nearly 3 hours. It's not much.
Click to expand...

90% brightness is too much: it could drain the battery very fast.
But you still seem to have very poor performance from you battery.
Did you try to check out with iBackupBot ?
 
BrettApple said:
Well, first thing that comes to mind is
A. Change it to fetch less often, such as hourly.
B. Use mail clients with push functionality. Such as Outlook or Mailbox (Gmail).

If it's checking for new mail every 15 minutes it has to go online and sync each of your 5 accounts. That will take a pretty big hit on the battery as you've seen. Thats 4 checks on 5 accounts, or 20 checks total per hour. Quite a lot to handle without having push notifications.
Click to expand...

Are you saying it's better to have push notifications enabled? I always thought that killed battery.
 
pooleman said:
Are you saying it's better to have push notifications enabled? I always thought that killed battery.
Click to expand...

There are a lot of things that people THINK will kill the battery, but in reality, they're just uninformed.

I have a friend at work that HAS to close every app when they're done with it. That's not the point of the multitasking tray. There's only so much you can tell someone... they just won't believe you no matter how hard you try to tell them.

Also, having bluetooth on all the time doesn't kill battery either. It used to in the past, but the latest bluetooth technology is pretty incredible. I have my bluetooth on 24/7 and at the end of the day, my battery is only at about 90% (and I don't charge daily either).

So yeah, Push doesn't drain your battery.
 
Here's my iPhone 5 for comparison. It's a Sunday, so my use is a little lower than normal, but it would still be above or around 20% this time of day. I've had it since January 2013, and it still goes all day usually. My three emails accounts are all set to fetch manually. It's usually not my first mode of communication, so I'll check it maybe two or three times throughout the day. I have Bluetooth off because I don't have any use for it. Whether that helps or not I'm not sure. I also have Background App Refresh and certain location services turned off, and I close apps out of the switcher (more of an OCD and data saver thing than battery, but it doesn't seem to hurt it). I also have brightness set to auto.
 

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Jayson A said:
There are a lot of things that people THINK will kill the battery, but in reality, they're just uninformed.

I have a friend at work that HAS to close every app when they're done with it. That's not the point of the multitasking tray. There's only so much you can tell someone... they just won't believe you no matter how hard you try to tell them.

Also, having bluetooth on all the time doesn't kill battery either. It used to in the past, but the latest bluetooth technology is pretty incredible. I have my bluetooth on 24/7 and at the end of the day, my battery is only at about 90% (and I don't charge daily either).

So yeah, Push doesn't drain your battery.
Click to expand...

Do you realize that's quite subjective ?
If you receive a lot of emails during the day, push technology would have an hit on your battery life, for example (while with manual fetching you could check you mailbox only when you want, under Wi-Fi coverage).

And I actually close every unused app in the multitasking tray. It improves my safari browsing experience quite a lot.
 
I think it's a shame that you cannot have the mail checked every 15 minutes. I rely on email a lot for my business, and I have it syncing every 15 minutes when I'm not on my computer. I'm glad the battery life is better with the iphone 6.
 
Sure looks like a low signal problem to me. Your phone will waste a lot of battery power trying to do background things with a low signal. Is there a particular place you spend a lot of time where the signal is poor? Can you connect to wi-fi in these places--which would eliminate the low signal.
 
I have 2 gmail accounts and 2 yahoo accounts - all of which I use regularly. I get 100+ on my gmail a day and half that on my yahoo accounts.

I use gmail exclusively to be the collector of all my email accounts --- Settings --> Accounts and Import --- add your other accounts as pop3. My main gmail which is most important I get right away and my pop3 accounts seem to be checked every 30 mins or so.

Gmail uses 2% of my battery. (I don't ever compose on gmail just quickly check and move to my laptop if I have to write anything).
 
BigMcGuire said:
I have 2 gmail accounts and 2 yahoo accounts - all of which I use regularly. I get 100+ on my gmail a day and half that on my yahoo accounts.

I use gmail exclusively to be the collector of all my email accounts --- Settings --> Accounts and Import --- add your other accounts as pop3. My main gmail which is most important I get right away and my pop3 accounts seem to be checked every 30 mins or so.

Gmail uses 2% of my battery. (I don't ever compose on gmail just quickly check and move to my laptop if I have to write anything).
Click to expand...

I do the very same thing.
 
Max(IT) said:
Do you realize that's quite subjective ?
If you receive a lot of emails during the day, push technology would have an hit on your battery life, for example (while with manual fetching you could check you mailbox only when you want, under Wi-Fi coverage).

And I actually close every unused app in the multitasking tray. It improves my safari browsing experience quite a lot.
Click to expand...

You don't have to close apps, just close your safari tabs when you're done. I've never had a single performance problem on my iPhone due to apps being open and I literally NEVER close my apps. The only thing I do is close tabs when I'm done with them (leaving tabs open fills up memory, so if you don't need those tabs open, just close them).
 
Jayson A said:
You don't have to close apps, just close your safari tabs when you're done. I've never had a single performance problem on my iPhone due to apps being open and I literally NEVER close my apps. The only thing I do is close tabs when I'm done with them (leaving tabs open fills up memory, so if you don't need those tabs open, just close them).
Click to expand...

I've done some extensive tests on that issue.
Manually closing apps actually helps to release memory faster than relying on the automatic memory manager.
 
Max(IT) said:
I've done some extensive tests on that issue.
Manually closing apps actually helps to release memory faster than relying on the automatic memory manager.
Click to expand...

But iOS takes care of memory on it's own. It's not your job to manually do it.

Once you open something that requires more RAM, the oldest stuff gets unloaded from the RAM to make room for the new app or process. It's not something that you should have to do.

You may think you're making a difference, but you're not.
 
Jayson A said:
But iOS takes care of memory on it's own. It's not your job to manually do it.

Once you open something that requires more RAM, the oldest stuff gets unloaded from the RAM to make room for the new app or process. It's not something that you should have to do.

You may think you're making a difference, but you're not.
Click to expand...

As I said, it's not flawlessly in doing that, so I can help and I'm actually experiencing a better experience.
 
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