#ios mail problem

This just happened to me.  Apple Mail on an iPhone stopped downloading the latest email in my Inbox. Instead I’d get a “downloading x of x” in tiny print at the bottom of the display but the message would shortly disappear and no new email would appear.

Same Inbox worked fine  on all laptops and desktops.

I assumed this was a next_uid problem. So, I tried moving all the email out of the Inbox and into another folder and back again.  That got me the current email but not the next new email.

I tried downloading and setting up MS Outlook (I’d heard good things and wanted to try it anyway.  That didn’t help. And I removed the app.

The ONLY solution is to delete your account in Mail App and then delete Mail app and reinstall it. 

You delete the account in Settings->Passwords & Accounts.  Choose each account by clicking on it (you can leave the iCloud one) and on the ensuing page click “Delete Account” in red at the bottom.

You delete the app by holding your finger on the app icon until you see an “x” in the top right corner of the icon.  Click the 'X’ and then click “OK” when it asks you “Do you want to delete the data” - because “Yes! you do want to delete the data.”

You can find the Apple Mail app in the App Store.

Deleting the account by itself didn’t work because upon signing the IMAP account up again, I’d get a “XXXX account already exists”.  Deleting the account must leave some meta data.  Sigh...

So don’t think twice, it really doesn’t take as long as you’d think, delete all the Mail accounts in Settings on the iphone and then delete the Mail App and reinstall the Mail App.

I’m writing this because I couldn’t find a single reference that was helpful for resolving this problem.

OK - new addendum - it turns out that was not a long term fix.  We are running dovecot on our email server and I had to run this command to fix the issue:

sudo doveadm force-resync -u username-of-broken-account INBOX