Are these IMAP, POP or EAS accounts?

IMAP

Marc, check if the authentication of the account is set to PASSWORD and not to MD5 Challenge-Response.

If not, try to set to PASSWORD.

Stefano.  it made no difference.  I have noticed its only happening on the iphone x and XR at this point. IOS version 13.1.2 and 13.2.2.

I contacted apple and they said they were aware of the issue(felt like a canned response) and they would be releasing a fix. I have  a call with someone there today.

Hey, we have also notices this since a while back now. The behavior is strange since mail seems to work OK on the device, then suddenly all emails disappear from the Inbox folder, then the whole mailbox starts re-syncing again. This happens a couple of times per week for each user. 

We see this the most with iOS and BlackBerry devices synced via EAS, but I also get it for example with MS Outlook 2019 if it crashes. There are instances when my Outlook desktop program crashes and then the Inbox is empty and the whole mailbox starts re-syncing. 

Sorry that others have the issue too, but I`m glad I was not crazy - so it`s a real problem.

I only have IMAP and its been reported by 3 users and I have been able to duplicate it. Unfortunately I cannot tell what is going on with the Iphone since I cannot determine if there is a log of errors or something to troubleshoot with an iphone.

my guess is a larger number of users are effected but dont report it.

Of course its effecting my highest profile customers.

Yes, of course, people with the largest mailboxes and many appointments/contacts are the most affected (even though I have them only sync 1 month), which means our higher-ups.

I'm starting to get more reports of this from my users.

The latest iOS (13.2.2) seems to have quite a few bugs!

@Marc Frega, what did Apple say to you last?

Apple was useless.  several scheduled calls with them and 2 hung up while transferring to "senior tech" and third call never arrived.  I will revisit today.

Good luck. I'm tempted to call them myself, but fear I may get the same experience as you!

While I can see my emails (EAS and IMAP accounts) on my iPhone I don't receive the toast notifications in real time. For example, I'll load the mail app and then all my emails download and the toast notifications go crazy - alerting me to all these new messages.

In addition to the above, I did have a problem with email content (the body of messages) either not loading or taking forever to load. This hasn't occured for a while now.

Our clients are reporting the same and we have one client with a blank Inbox. However, unlike you orignal post, their Inbox doesn't magically reappear!

ok so my call with a senior advisor was not exactly fruitful.  Here is what I learned. 

There is no specific log for imap. There are dozens of logs but they couldnt point the exact one that would handle mail exceptions.

There are no mail program updates as they are updated as part of the O/S and the time frame of issues  corresponds with the release of IOS 13

They are putting the blame on "smaller email providers" not keeping up to date with apple IOS 13.

They requested that I change the fetch method to manual. This means the email imap fetch would only occur when in the application and checking email.

They were able to remote into the phone and view the screen but I was unable to duplicate in the time frame regardless of fetch method being manual or auto.

iOS 13.2.3 includes bug fixes and improvements for your iPhone. This update:

We've seen similar issues with the latest version of SM + iOS but with all the users, we found that the grp file for that particular day was corrupt.

Check your logs to see if you see "corrupt" warnings

I Hopeits 3.2.3 that fies. It does seem to pinpoint the exact issue in the release notes. I will followup.

First indications are that it made it worse.

I'm seeing improvements with the latest iOS update.  It looks like marking and deleting messages are now working properly.  Both macOS Catalina and iOS13 mail apps have been extremely buggy!

Tim, the marking and deleting is not what this thread is about. I have several users that are asking me why don't we have this issue on gmail or on other imap servers.  I have an open ticket with support on this issue for several users.  The biggest impact here is that even though i only have 1300 users, the people who make the decisions on whether or not to stay with smartermail and go to gmail are the ones who are effected. The issue for my users is that 13.1.2 and above are progressively getting worse with 13.2.2 and 13.2.3.  in my tests I am seeing that users inboxes are not refreshing. so while it may show a count of unread messages, the actual inbox says no mail. in 13.2.3 that same mailbox being accessed by 5 different devices are showing different results.

Im getting more reports on this.

Marc, this issue will be brought up with development during our next review meeting. As of right now though, the resync operation we're seeing in the logs is being initiated from the client device, and this leads us to believe this is something potentially occurring in the iOS updates. We should have more information for you in the near future though so please standby and we'll get some feedback out to you as soon as possible. 

I have the same issue on an iPhone X with iOS 13.2.3. Seems to be sporadic and not easily replicable.

Same here, especially with a large inbox. iOS 13.2.3 on (at least) iPhone 7 and iPhone XRs.

Here is what I have confirmed.

IMAP is all i tested. and it is still happenning

Accounts can be new or older

Inbox size irrelevant

number of folders irrelevant

multiple devices using imap possibly is an influencer but only happens with iphone/ipads

IOS 12.x doesnt seem to suffer the problems

happens on sm16.x and current releases.

Doesnt happen with gmail

always effects my clients who are the most demanding and would really hurt me if they quit my services because of this.

those same clients say "why doesn't it happen with gmail and aol".

It seems to me an IOS issue, not a SmarterMail one.

Can you confirm?

Smartertools believes it is not them but I was told they will be addressing it in some way in next release. I can confirm on my end of about 1500 users that only 5 reports have come in and I have been able to duplicate it and its only happenning on iphone IOS 13.x. No android users have reported the issue

We don't believe the issues you are seeing are related to SmarterMail. We have seen, and continue to see, similar issues on Exchange as well as Office365 when using an iOS client.  This last minor update for iOS has drastically increased the stability of the mail app in iOS and Apple has conceded that iOS 13 was extremely buggy upon release. As a result, they’ve vowed to make changes to their release processes for future updates. 

 

Regarding responses from support relating to EAS, us “addressing (the issues) in some way” and our upcoming SmarterMail release, we have updated all protocols to be even more RFC compliant.  We have also added new features for all protocols.  I’m sure that’s what they mean, and not that we’re addressing this issue (these issues) in particular.) We have worked with Microsoft so that Outlook for iOS and Android perform similar to Exchange.  We have also approached timezones differently, which will help calendaring.  The number of improvements and changes we’ve made will improve things across all protocols and clients. That’s why we are asking customers to test the BETA to make sure anything they see today gets resolved early. If not, we want to know about it so we can work on it.

 

If your users are seeing problems using the mail app on iOS using EAS, it is critical they delete and re-add their accounts on iOS because the mail app doesn't recover well from a problem. Deleting and re-adding may help, but there’s no guarantee the issue won’t come back. It’s just that updates to the mail client and its ability to “recover” or stop repeating the same issues can be problematic at best — removing and re-adding can help things start fresh.

 

We are getting very close to the production release of the upcoming SmarterMail which will greatly simplify the conversation with customers because we will be focusing on one codebase... not two very different versions of SmarterMail.

Thanks for the update Tim. Is that a beta production release or final that you’re close to?

I appreciate the update as well. I will say that the IOS devices I've tested with the problem are on the latest version (13.2.3), so any improvements from that release didn't translate to our issue being solved.

Just a quick follow up on the point Marc raised about improvements coming in IMAP. As Tim pointed out - This note was referring to incoming functionality in the IMAP protocol sync that should net better overall performance in the future. Unfortunately though this doesn't relate to the issue at hand and was more offered as a side note due to our troubleshooting.

On these sync issues, I have received word from two environments that IMAP sync is in better shape with the most recent updates to iOS. I've also heard another update is inbound at this time, and so we're going to reevaluate the behavior there to see if it has improved once available. 

Just wanted to point out that the latest IOS release 13.3 has not fixed the issues with the inbox.

Is anyone else still having these issues?

I have one client with the exact same issue (as described in your original post), but rebooting the phone doesn't help.

I'm using the Mail app on iOS 13.3 and have had various mail issues (except the above) since updraging to iOS 13+. Each release of iOS seems to get a little better, but it's still buggy!

Other clients are reporting issues with Hotmail/Outlook and Gmail hosted emails to. All of these clients are on iOS 13.x, but one is on 12.4.

Is anyone else having users report this issue?  Specifically the No Mail issue in the inbox?

Hello everyone, just a quick update on this as I've received a good majority of these user reports. When iOS v13 first released we began troubleshooting these issues as standard IMAP sync issues, but in each case the resync showed as stemming from the device itself. With subsequent updates to iOS v13 we received reports that the sync behavior improved considerably, with the latest release resolving all but a couple of these reports. In at least one of those we were able to remove the account from the iOS device, readd it, and allow an hour or two for the initial resync to complete; resulting in a full, stable sync of the account. As such, I recommend all users reporting these issues be advised to apply any available updates to the device, then remove and readd their accounts for best results. 

Thank you for that update. We will try that ASAP and hopefully IOS 14 is more stable when it's released next year!

You're very welcome Brian, happy to help! If users continue to have trouble after that point I recommend submitting a support ticket so we can help narrow down the root cause. Have a great rest of your day!

Update - latest version of iOS seems to be working much better for our users and the problems has *mostly* disappeared.

Just wanted to point out that after trying to resolve an issue with a users mail with imap on iphone and latest build of SM we've had to move the users domain over to one of our linux servers and the issues are no longer.

Disappointing, but clients pay our bills and allow us to remain in business. 

This issue is still rampant across my userbase. Anyone have any idea why this happens?

We have no tickets or known issues related to IMAP on iOS!  Please submit a ticket if you want us to look at the issue.  Keep in mind, there are still a number of bugs in Mail on iOS that require adding and removing accounts to resolve issues no matter the mail server or protocol.   Even Mail on Big Sur is still a mess using EWS no matter Exchange or SmarterMail.  

The most common Mail problem on iOS is that the mail app sometimes won't show any new emails even though it has the emails until you go all the way back to All Folders and then go back into Inbox or a sub folder.  Sometimes you actually need to kill the mail app and re-load it to show the emails. It is a display issue on iOS and its been around for a year and it doesn't matter the protocol or server.

If you want us to look at a specific issue that you can reproduce or currently exists for a user, please contact us!

Tim I appreciate the reply. The thing is people are not complaining about this with GMAIL. I love smartermail, I truly do but I cannot get through to Apple to resolve these issues, ive tried escalating it and getting answers.  My userbase dwindles to gmail every month if my largest accounts bail I will need to ball from smartermail simply because i will have no customers.

My tickets related to imap issues on iphones

009-2556ED65-0022 - Started On Nov 7, 2019 

0CF-25DB7D36-0017 - Started On Feb 15, 2020 

NEW ISSUES related to IMAP on both outlook on IOS and Android

275-2738A012-0B40 - Started On Nov 6, 2020 

We have no users reporting issues with iOS Mail with IMAP, we are on SM 7611.

No issue here with iOS and IMAP.

We have 164 domains and many users have iPhone with IMAP...

@Marc

Based on your ticket dates I assume that you on a similar version to what we were and I can confirm that there are issues with previous versions of smartermail and iphone imap.

Exactly as you explained, and in addition when the mail client updates, it lists what would look like emails on the mail server but those cant be read.

I have this issue with the current SmarterMail release and latest iOS version. Seems specific to this account on both iPhone and iPad. Had the issue with previous iOS and SmarterMail too.

This has been happening to me and my iPhone users for years. They simply stopped complaining to me about it. Also, any folders under Inbox cannot be accessed via iPhone or iPad. I am afraid to move those folders as major folder moves have been problematic in the past. I go to the webmail or Thunderbird for those.

iOS Mail has display issues that can show a folder as empty when it really isn't.  This can be resolved by using the back arrow to go to the folder list and then back to the folder you were on.   This issue has nothing to do with SmarterMail and occurs randomly no matter account type, protocol or server/service you use with iOS Mail.

There are no known issues with SmarterMail and iOS and we have many millions of users on IMAP and EAS with iOS Mail. 

I had that with my personal Iphone and Ipad.

I removed the email accounts and added them back, that resolved it.

But we have no complaints from any one else as far as I know.

I am still experiencing issues on my iPhone 13 with iOS 17. Emails are missing or differ from the webmail. After some time, it starts working. Sometimes, the email folders are empty where the emails should be. It is really inconvenient to use email on the iPhone.