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iPhone won't retrieve emails unless I open the Mail app

B

bananabar

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 10, 2008
218
0
I've set "Fetch new data" to hourly but my iPhone (1st gen with 2.1) simply won't fetch emails from my Gmail account (using IMAP).

Mail on my MBP works fine.

As a test, I ordered something from Amazon yesterday afternoon and refrained from opening Mail until this morning. Sure enough, the email then came though with the date "Yesterday".

Any ideas?
 
I am having the same problem. I have been to the Apple store twice and finally they gave me a new phone. I deleted my Comcast address off my phone and just have my gmail one. I'll see how things go today. Apple store claims to have not heard anyone else having this problem. I told them to go check the Apple message board and there are 100's of posts of this happening to others. This is getting to be very frustrating. I had a perfect phone for a year then upgraded to 2.1 and now this:mad:
 
Really? You got a new phone? So now you have a 3G to replace your first gen phone?
 
No, they gave me one just like I had which I am just fine with. It suits my needs just fine. Though a new 3G would be nice I don't want to pay the additional monthly fees for it.
 
So really, am I pretty much the only person who has this problem?

Does everyone elses Mail sync every 15mins (or whatever)?
 
You Are Not Alone

You're not alone. I have posted on two or three other threads regarding two email issues plaguing the iPhone since Version 2 was introduced.

I have a 1st generation iPhone that worked impressively and flawlessly for months before I blundered into Software version 2.

I'd gladly abandon the two web apps that I installed if I could wave a magic wand and go back before that fateful day that I made the mistake of updating.

For the record, I have 5 POP accounts, all from the same ISP set up.

Since Version 2, I first encountered the situation where several times a day, the iphone would try to fetch every fifteen minutes as it did like clockwork since the day I brought it home, but would get stuck trying to get the mail. The only way to get it unstuck and to get the mail was to shut the phone down and restart it.

This last update "fixed" it so that even though it is set to fetch every fifteen minutes, it only very rarely fetches while unplugged in standby mode, until either the phone is wakened or until I open the email application and peer inside.

I use my phone for business and I have become so desperate for a fix that I have resorted to checking for an update every day.

This is not the Apple Computer to which I was once loyal.
 
woodyrr said:
You're not alone. I have posted on two or three other threads regarding two email issues plaguing the iPhone since Version 2 was introduced.

I have a 1st generation iPhone that worked impressively and flawlessly for months before I blundered into Software version 2.

I'd gladly abandon the two web apps that I installed if I could wave a magic wand and go back before that fateful day that I made the mistake of updating.

For the record, I have 5 POP accounts, all from the same ISP set up.

Since Version 2, I first encountered the situation where several times a day, the iphone would try to fetch every fifteen minutes as it did like clockwork since the day I brought it home, but would get stuck trying to get the mail. The only way to get it unstuck and to get the mail was to shut the phone down and restart it.

This last update "fixed" it so that even though it is set to fetch every fifteen minutes, it only very rarely fetches while unplugged in standby mode, until either the phone is wakened or until I open the email application and peer inside.

I use my phone for business and I have become so desperate for a fix that I have resorted to checking for an update every day.

This is not the Apple Computer to which I was once loyal.
Click to expand...

Ive been in the very same situation, although I'm patient and wanting it fixed, it does get very frustrating at times. I really don't want to return to the BB but when it came to email it was always there for me.
 
Are these grounds to take it back and get a refund? "Not as described" or something.

I'm getting really fed-up with my iPhone. What happened to Apple stuff "just working"???
 
This appears to happen with mine whenever I've switched to a wifi network and then back to 2G/3G. I usually need to power-cycle to fix it. If I keep wifi switched off then it seems to be fine for long periods.
 
ansalmo said:
This appears to happen with mine whenever I've switched to a wifi network and then back to 2G/3G. I usually need to power-cycle to fix it. If I keep wifi switched off then it seems to be fine for long periods.
Click to expand...

I turned off my iPhone WIFI option this morning, restarted the iPhone, and went about my business all day using the cellular network exclusively. The iPhone would still not fetch emails while in standby.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

I have had this problem also.
I have set POP Gmail to "fetch mail every 15 minutes" and it really doesn't do it's job well.
I also have to click on my Mail app to get my mail manually.
Must be a little hiccup in the iPhone.
 
Given the wide array of people who have experienced this problem (and it making Page 1 of AppleInsider), I don't think this is really something we're (most of us) going to fix by tweaking settings. Sounds like we might have to wait for 2.2, if not a later version.
 
Add my name to the list of users affected by fetch not fetching emails. It appears as though fetch will only work when you either a) open Mail or b) use an app that has net functionality. In the latter case, I will notice that when I open up Safari or text messaging or Flycast or anything else that draws data, fetch will use that opportunity to fetch. Otherwise, it doesn't work (like it did).
 
Mine will only fetch new mail if I do a hard boot. I then receive all the mail that's available, but to receive anything further I need to reboot once again.
Incidently, this has been going on since I got the 3g. It started to work for a brief time just before the latest update, then after the update I'm back to this. Very very annoying.
Mick
 
This just gets worse and worse!

woodyrr said:
You're not alone. I have posted on two or three other threads regarding two email issues plaguing the iPhone since Version 2 was introduced.
Click to expand...

-snip-

Well, here’s a new twist.

My usual routine in the morning is to turn my iPhone on and review the emails that have come in over night. Usually, when turned on, the emails start immediately counting up on the envelope and the thing “boops” when they are all in. This morning there were no emails, which is extremely unusual. I tapped the inbox of one of the five accounts and the “last updated” time was last night at 20:47. Once opened, it ground about and found an email. Every one of the remaining accounts had a “last updated” time of 20:47 and most of them had emails trapped inside that only appeared after I tapped the corresponding inbox.

I realize that all this whining about email probably gets tiring to see, but I make few phone calls on my iPhone and receive even fewer. I can recite the entire contents from memory of every text message that I have sent or received in my lifetime, they number so few. The two features on which I rely are email first, and calendar alerts second. AT&T is about to ding my bank account for another month of this and I’m growing less enamored of the iPhone, Apple, and AT&T with each moment that passes without a resolution.:mad:

BTW, I don’t use the alarm clock feature, but I saw that someone else posted that they were having problems, and sure enough, I set mine to alarm at 7:00 AM several days ago, and it hasn’t done it yet.

I echo bananabar's comment: "I'm getting really fed-up with my iPhone. What happened to Apple stuff "just working"???"
 
. . . and worse.

Since the vast majority of my calendar alerts are set to alert "on the date of event" I hadn't noticed that I was getting my alerts on the computer, but was no longer receiving them on the iPhone after the last update. I had suspected that they had quit, but this morning, I received a very important alert on my computer, but nothing on the iPhone although the appointment is on the iPhone calendar and it shows that it is to alert me on the date of event. There is not one feature in the updated iPhone on which I rely that works. :mad:
 
Hi,
I'm having the same problem, my Mail app has stop receiving email unless I open it.
Is there a fix for it?
I've tried hard rebooting, force closing the Mail app, deleting the mail accounts and readding them, no luck at all. :(
 
In my case, restarting doesn't accomplish anything. The myriad of problems manifested themselves immediately after updating to version 2 of the firmware and became worse with 2.1 and it is a serious flaw in the firmware that is the cause. I have come to the conclusion, that there is nothing that I can do about this except wait and hope that Apple Computer eventually gets around to working the problem and comes up with a solution. I'll hobble along another year until my contract expires and then dump the iPhone and AT&T and research another phone and provider that is more reliable.

It is my opinion that Apple Computer is trying to do too many different things and, as a result, is not doing any of them well.
 
Ok, my Mail.app still won't download mail when push is on for Yahoo!, the mail will only be downloaded when I open the app, however mail does download if fetch is on only, which basically sucks because I wanted to use push for Yahoo! :-(
And now my App Store doesn't show any app I've got available for update, have to use iTunes to find out :mad:
 
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