Mail.app draining a lot of battery on iPhone 7 (iOS 10.0.2)

[RamGuy]

My girlfriend is complaining about the battery life on her iPhone 7. She charges overnight and starts the day on 100% and she will normally have about 30-50% battery left when arriving home after work depending on how much she has been using it throughout the day.

But the past few days she complains about her battery dropping to below 20%, even on days she barley uses the phone. I have tried to figure what might causing the drains and according to the battery settings the default Apple Mail.app has managed to drain 24% (!) of the battery in the past 24-hours.


That's a ridiculous amount of battery for the mail.app to drain! And it even claims it's only been used for 4 minutes in the foreground, and 1 minutes in the background?

She normally receives 2-5 mails per day, and they usually don't contain anything other than plain old text and nothing fancy.


I'm using the default Mail.app myself on my iPhone 6S Plus (have yet to receive my iPhone 7 Plus Jet Black) and I have yet to see the mail.app even show under battery tracking as it has never used more than 1% battery life. And I receive a much larger amount of e-mails compared to my girlfriend on a daily basis.


What's going on here? Is it bugged? She has two accounts, one that use Office 365 / Exchange for work, and the other is Gmail. I on the other hand only use a Office 365 / Exchange e-mail and nothing else.

Is it Gmail that is bugging? Her settings is set to "Fetch" as Gmail don't support push in the Apple Mail.app for some stupid reason and her fetch intervals was set to manually so I can't for the life of my understand why it should be having issues when it's not supposed to do anything on it's own.

 

[simonsi]

In Settings for Mail accounts, turn off Push on the top slider, not just account by account. I think that stops the background task running that listens for push traffic. I turned that off and mail activity is now sub-10% of battery usage due to background checking on the 15-min Fetch cycle on 4 accounts. Since doing that I literally find the phone (6) colder and it was a step-change in better battery life.

 

[Yun0]

use push or manual only, never use fetch. fetch is garbage that keeps checking at whatever interval even if nothings changed. at least with push if something comes in it gets it, and right away too, if nothing, then nothing & doesnt have to keep "checking" like fetch does. the power used from push to hold that 1 tcp connection is far less then fetching dozens or even upwards of nearly 100 times a day..

if ur mail service doesnt support push, like gmail then use the gmail app or whatever app the service provider should have, they all have push.

 

[simonsi]

use push or manual only, never use fetch. fetch is garbage that keeps checking at whatever interval even if nothings changed. at least with push if something comes in it gets it, and right away too, if nothing, then nothing & doesnt have to keep "checking" like fetch does. the power used from push to hold that 1 tcp connection is far less then fetching dozens or even upwards of nearly 100 times a day..

if ur mail service doesnt support push, like gmail then use the gmail app or whatever app the service provider should have, they all have push.

Don't agree, with Push the phone has to keep a listener active to repond to the pushes, in my experience switching from Push to 15-min Fetch yielded a huge improvement in battery life. The data exchenge on a "nothing new" fetch cycle is tiny so if nothing new, the app shuts down for 15mins...but YMMV

 

[C DM]

Don't agree, with Push the phone has to keep a listener active to repond to the pushes, in my experience switching from Push to 15-min Fetch yielded a huge improvement in battery life. The data exchenge on a "nothing new" fetch cycle is tiny so if nothing new, the app shuts down for 15mins...but YMMV

At the same time Apple themselves seems to say that push is more battery intensive and it's one of the main things that gets disabled when Low Power Mode is used.

 

[Thor_1]

I would put mail fetch/push in manual and test for a day or two.