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Do you ever have the problem when you start Mail on your iPhone and it quits right away? You have the feeling that it may be caused by a rogue email and you try to delete things but the mail crashes right away and the stuff you deleted is still there? You've tried reinstalling and deleting the account and recreating the account but all solutions have worked only briefly if at all?
I haven't. However, someone I know has and that's how I came to know so much about it.
A lot of people seem to have had the problem and from looking on line I wasn't able to find any good solutions, but I was recently presented with an iPhone that was doing this and after much fiddling I noticed that the crash would occur shortly after the Mail app began attempting to update. On a hunch I discovered the following workaround.
Step 1: Prevent the Mail from updating.
Go to settings and turn Airplane Mode ON. This disables all wireless communication. Mail updating will be impossible.
Step 2: Start Mail
When Mail starts it will notice that it has no communication services and it will pop up a notice saying as much. You have the option of saying OK or going to Settings. Just say OK.
Step 3: Delete suspicious emails
In the case I had there were several spam mails that pretended to be mail bounces(failure to deliver messages) with attached zip files. I deleted those and emptied the trash. Then I shut down Mail.
Step 4: Reconnect to the great wide world.
Go back to settings and turn Airplane mode OFF. I was near a WiFi connection I wanted to use so I waited for that to configure and connect.
Step 5: See if it works.
Restart Mail. Everything should be OK and you should get any new messages you haven't downloaded yet. If it's still crashing, repeat and remove more emails. If you end up with no emails at all and it still crashes then the problem is something else.
The chances are, if this has happened to you once, it will happen again and soon. Once you are on a spam list you are likely to get repeats of the spam that crashed you and if you have a lot of dim friends who click on "zip" files of strange mails then you are likely to get lots of copies of this kind of email as your friends are probably infected with some email trojan/virus. Just reuse the procedure as necessary until Apple fixes the Mail App.
Why it should not fail when previewing or viewing or deleting or moving the bad messages yet fails when updating, I don't know. It sounds like maybe someone needed to parse the messages for some reason for updating but rather than finding out what the proper APIs were they hacked a parser of their own in and skimped on error checking. Hey, that kind of stuff happens. Software is worse than Law or Sausages in many respects and the most "productive" coders are the ones who cause the most problems.
I haven't. However, someone I know has and that's how I came to know so much about it.
A lot of people seem to have had the problem and from looking on line I wasn't able to find any good solutions, but I was recently presented with an iPhone that was doing this and after much fiddling I noticed that the crash would occur shortly after the Mail app began attempting to update. On a hunch I discovered the following workaround.
Step 1: Prevent the Mail from updating.
Go to settings and turn Airplane Mode ON. This disables all wireless communication. Mail updating will be impossible.
Step 2: Start Mail
When Mail starts it will notice that it has no communication services and it will pop up a notice saying as much. You have the option of saying OK or going to Settings. Just say OK.
Step 3: Delete suspicious emails
In the case I had there were several spam mails that pretended to be mail bounces(failure to deliver messages) with attached zip files. I deleted those and emptied the trash. Then I shut down Mail.
Step 4: Reconnect to the great wide world.
Go back to settings and turn Airplane mode OFF. I was near a WiFi connection I wanted to use so I waited for that to configure and connect.
Step 5: See if it works.
Restart Mail. Everything should be OK and you should get any new messages you haven't downloaded yet. If it's still crashing, repeat and remove more emails. If you end up with no emails at all and it still crashes then the problem is something else.
The chances are, if this has happened to you once, it will happen again and soon. Once you are on a spam list you are likely to get repeats of the spam that crashed you and if you have a lot of dim friends who click on "zip" files of strange mails then you are likely to get lots of copies of this kind of email as your friends are probably infected with some email trojan/virus. Just reuse the procedure as necessary until Apple fixes the Mail App.
Why it should not fail when previewing or viewing or deleting or moving the bad messages yet fails when updating, I don't know. It sounds like maybe someone needed to parse the messages for some reason for updating but rather than finding out what the proper APIs were they hacked a parser of their own in and skimped on error checking. Hey, that kind of stuff happens. Software is worse than Law or Sausages in many respects and the most "productive" coders are the ones who cause the most problems.
