A bug in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 appears to be causing significant problems with IMAP accounts: More and more users are reporting that email communication is disrupted after updating their iPhones and iPads: Retrieving emails via IMAP sometimes fails completely, and sometimes errors occur when synchronizing individual mail folders. The mail server is not responding and is terminating the connection, iOS states in a warning dialog. The user is asked to check the access data. Sending emails also appears to work unchanged for those affected.
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Mail providers also report IMAP problems
According to the reports, re-entering the login data does not help. In addition to Apple Mail, the error can also be observed with some other email clients such as Outlook, also specifically when using IMAP accounts. The problem apparently cannot be limited to a specific email provider: Apple’s iCloud mail service appears to be affected, as does Gmail (integrated via IMAP) and other services such as GMX and web.de.
Vodafone announced on Monday that the network operator had been struggling with a disruption to its IMAP mail server for several days. The trigger was the iOS 18 update, which has been available for a good week and is gradually being installed on more and more devices. The IMAP outages do not appear to occur in the macOS 15 Sequoia released by Apple at the same time.
The specific cause of the error remains unclear, and it is clear that not all users of IMAP email accounts are encountering the error: On devices in the Mac & i editorial team, no abnormalities were observed with IMAP under iOS 18.0 (final version and beta versions). In conjunction with Exchange and when using email apps from the respective provider, everything else seems to work as usual.
No tangible workaround for IMAP bug
Accordingly, there is currently no tangible workaround to retrieve emails via IMAP again. Some users experiment with the IMAP path prefix in the advanced IMAP settings (“Settings > Apps > Mail > Mail Accounts > [Name des Accounts]”). Other users report that it worked again after deleting and re-adding the email account. Others try their luck by taking the plunge and installing the beta version of iOS 18.1, but it is still unclear whether IMAP will then work error-free. Otherwise, the only option is to wait for a bug fix update from Apple soon. The manufacturer usually delivers a .0.1 version pretty quickly after operating system upgrades.
(lbe)