iPhone 3G “Checking for email” problem
iPhone 3G “Checking for email” problem. my iPhone 3G does not checking email. when I go to email it will start checking for email but it never completes. I have 3 email accounts set up — 1 Yahoo, 1 Gmail, a POP account. The internet connection is not the problem — this same issue occurs over 3G, Wifi and EDGE. It will say “Checking for email” for over 30 minutes on each account. and it never completes.
As soon as I reset my iPhone it checks for email and receives email perfectly, however, half way through the day the previously mentioned issue arises and nothing gets through.
I have tried many ways to solve this problems, but only this work for some hours
1. Deleted three email accounts from my iPhone.
2. Changed one of my three accounts on my desktop computer from POP to IMAP (when I say changed, what I mean is added a new IMAP account and then disabled the POP version. You can’t really make that type of change once an account has been created, so you have to open a new one and either disable or delete the old one, savings messages first, of course.)
3. Set up the same IMAP account on my iPhone.
what other methods do you know to solve iphone 3g “checking for email” problem
Tags: iphone-3g, iphone-3g-email-settings, iphone-email-problems
I have the EXACT same problem. For no reason it seems that my email will stop checking until I reset the phone. If you find an answer please let me know.
go into the email app, watch it sit there ‘checking for mail’ and just hold down the main/home button for 6 seconds.
shuts the app down. problem solved.
I had the same issue
fred bloggs - you are a lifesaver!
I have four email accounts in my g3 iPhone. all worked fine until I downloaded the iPhone update 2.0.1 now one a pop account says username or password are incorrect. They are right.
I began having this problem with my original iPhone after the 2.0 upgrade. I have since upgraded to a new 16GB iPhone 3G and have the same problem. Quite frustrating. I almost have to turn my phone off and back on to check for messages.
[...] today I found this article on FreeIphoner.com, where an improbably-named “Fred Bloggs” posted this: go into the email app, watch it [...]
Some guy on another blog came up with this idea and it works to solve the hanging email problem. Try this:
– On the iPhone, delete all e-mail accounts.
– Reset the iPhone’s network settings (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings).
– Disable Wi-Fi (some e-mail accounts don’t work properly if set up the first time with Wi-Fi in use, he explained).
– On the iPhone, manually re-add the e-mail accounts. (When setting up my sbcglobal.net e-mail account, which is now an AT&T Yahoo service, I was advised to choose Yahoo as the service provider.)
– Disable e-mail syncing with iTunes.
I tried the solution posted by Frank in NY on 8-20-08, following all of the steps outlined, but still have the same problem. The posted by Fred bloggs on 8-8-08 does work (holding down the “home” button for awhile), although it inconvenient to have to do this one or more times each day.
It seems that the permanent solution posted by Frank in NY did in fact work.
I had an original iPhone and noticed the problem when upgrading the software to 2.0 Frustrated the life out of me. Upgraded to 3G iPhone and the problem is still there. What the heck £45 for a device that I have to reboot every half hour to receive my email.
Until now, I have always had to reboot the phone to (temporarily) solve the problem.
fred bloggs, whoever you are thanks for the tip to force quit the Email app, saves having to do a full reboot.
I still have a long list of gripes over the iPhone and the 3G version “Twice as fast, half the cost” just succeeds in frustrating me twice as much, twice as quickly with a battery life that lasts half as long!
I have been a staunch Apple supporter for years, but this iPhone has really bitten me hard. I’d recommend the iPhone to no one.
I did try every option listed above, talk to Apple and nothing work. I restore my phone twice, add only one email account, disable the Wi-Fi, reset it few times a day, but nothing seems to work (only work temp. and then the same problem).
I think iPhone have H/W (modem) issue combined with Edge / 3G network issues.
I miss my old Blackberry
I had the exact same problem when I setup the iphone for my 3 email accounts and tried the fix from Frank but it did not work for me. Then I noticed on my 2 sbcglobal accounts, the iphone incorrectly set the outgoing smpt server port - I believe it was set to 587 and it should use 465. Once I correctly set the port then all 3 of my email accounts started working OK. It is not very clear you can set the outgoing smtp port - but if you select “ON” it takes you to another screen with several settings. I did NOT in the end use the Yahoo Mail setup screen for my sbcglobal accounts because once it created the account the settings did not seem right - so I deleted it and started over using “OTHER” and then correctly setting the outgoing smtp port. All is fine now.
I called Apple. They have a fix that worked for me.
Go to Settings -> General -> Reset then select “Reset Network Settings”.
I’m suffering from this too. I’ve tried all the above fixes and the problem just eventually re-occurs. What gives? I’m pretty disappointed, it’s making me want to return the phone and go back to my Blackberry..
The spotty email support is something that I cannot live with much longer. I have tried the reset network settings and hopefully it will fix the problem. I never had this problem with the blackberry and I am sure there will be SW fixes in place for this.
It is just that I rely on my email when I travel and need a reliabible service which I have not received since I changed to the iphone. It is an elegant piece of equipment and can do a lot. I will say that the battery life is a joke and not like apple. They blew it
I have the same email issues with my iPhone 3G.
I have tried all of it, all mentioned above.
Same as Andrew, it re-occurs. How lame is that!?!
Holding down the “home” button and re-setting it seems to work (I just discovered that solution here, thanks!).
We will see how often I need to do that…
I certainly hope this gets fixed with an upgrade or something easy.
I don’t need email on the go all that often, so finding that reset option will do for now.
I do love my iPhone otherwise. I haven’t had any other problems aside from email.
Oh, yeah…
FYI, I also changed my synch settings in iTunes to NOT synch email.
I read somewhere that this helps stop the email problems with the iPhone 3G, but I haven’t noticed that making any difference.
I noticed an email account will get stuck “Checking for mail…” and the way I stop it without a reboot is using BossPrefs (Yes, jailbroken phone): Disable the account, wait a moment, then enable it again. Seems to “unstick” the account and everything starts working again. Must be a bug with the iPhone software because I have a Yahoo and two Gmail accounts. The Yahoo one seems to get stuck more often.
Anybody else get this workaround to succeed?
i have an iphone 3G and i noticed that when i receive emails on it works fine, but when i open my email at my desktop then the eamils on my phone do not appear on the desktop. any help??
Frank’s solution in fact worked.
On your desktop, check your account settings on what is selected from removing from the server. If you have this checked, once an email is received by the device, it is removed from the server.
Correction, Frank’s solution worked, until I went to wifi, then experienced the same problem of being stuck on checking for mail. I then followed John’s advice of not using the Yahoo Mail set up, and selected other, and it correctly set it up with POP mail.
I have noticed that it seems to get stuck when there is more than one email account active on the phone. Try going into settings and making only one account active at a time. You can switch back and forth in order to check email all accounts. Worked so far for me and it is easy to switch between active accounts. Hope this works for you.
Great fix here: http://traveler2.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/update-to-iphone-3g-e-mail-problem.html
Here are the steps:
– On the iPhone, delete all e-mail accounts.
– Reset the iPhone’s network settings (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings).
– Disable Wi-Fi (some e-mail accounts don’t work properly if set up the first time with Wi-Fi in use, he explained).
– On the iPhone, manually re-add the e-mail accounts. (When setting up my sbcglobal.net e-mail account, which is now an AT&T Yahoo service, I was advised to choose Yahoo as the service provider.)
– Disable e-mail syncing with iTunes.
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The problem I’m having is a bit DIFFERENT!
It shows messages downloading from my Gmail (Imap) to my iphone, but once it’s done, it doesn’t show up in my iphone inbox!! Even though it’s on my Gmail in box (on the desktop)!!!
Any one know how to fix it? I tried “Deleting ACCOUNT”, but it doesn’t really delete because as soon as I add the Gmail account again, ALL my previous emails are all there — in an instand, like it never really deleted it before!! (I can tell the difference between the emails being redownloaded and being on the phone, so it’s not that IMAP kicked in)
ANY IDEAS???
I struggled with this too. Have 4 accounts set up, all were working fine. Strangely, got a message saying “password is incorrect” on one of the accounts - this after working fine for several days. I reset the password. Sometime after that, all email accounts quit working… mail would go to “Checking for mail” and not return. Tried several of the steps above, to no avail. The one that did work was deleting and recreating the account that had the password problem, so I suspect that somehow this account got corrupted. Apple does not indicate any such problem, but there you have it. I hope this isn’t a recurrent “feature” of the iPhone but somehow I suspect otherwise… something is amiss.
My 3G phone quit downloading mail after upgrading to 3.0. None of the solutions offered here seemed to work, but playing around with the settings today I think I found the problem. The mail was set to manually fetch new data, but the individual accounts were set to fetch automatically. Changing each account setting to “manual” cleared up the problem.
The menu to change this settings is at:
> Settings
> Mail, Contacts, Calendars
> Fetch New Data
> Advanced
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I have the same problem and tried many methods mentioned above.
I used the method ‘Bugyosan’ and it seems to be working. Only been a few mins so far but I agree and think there are some accounts with conflicting settings. Cheers Bugyosan!
Yesterday–suddenly–the view of the buttons at the top of emails for returning to inbox disappeared. I now have to delete a message in order to see the next one…
I struggled with the I Phone’s refusal to download new mail messages and sometimes refusing to send messages until I decided to skip the Email client in the I Phone and simply use Gmail over the web using the Safari browser.
I bookmarked the Gmail site in Safari and stay logged on so I only need to open Safari to see and update my Email messages. It seems to work every time as opposed to the IPhone client that works sporadically.
Joe in Texas
when l email from my iphone, “sent” messages do not show up on my desktop at work. How can that be remedied?
when l email from my iphone, ’sent’ messages do not show up on my desktop at work. l need to be able to see what messages have been sent so my secretary doesn’t reply again. how can this be fixed?
i want to access in.com mails ..
kindly tell me how do i configure email in iphone 3gs.
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I did these steps as per Frank
“Reset the iPhone’s network settings (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings).”
and my email works now!
My iPhone has developed a problem. After hitting the mail key it downloads emails then goes straight back to the home screen. I cannot open the emails. It just continually goes back to home screen. I can’t even stay in mail long enough to delete mails.
I kept getting a connection error message. I tried the suggestion from Bugyosan & it now works. Thanks!!
I updated to OS4 and now I have two new problems.
1.- My emails download fine from 3 accounts on the “All inboxes” and they all show subject and preview; but when I open any of them, the email is blank. No matter how long I wait, if it’s text or HTML, or if it’s from a contact or not.
- The same happens if I go to each account separately.
2.- Also, if I try to write a new email I can type on the ‘To’ and ‘Subject’ fields but I can’t write on the main body. It doesn’t even show the pointer or anything, eventhough the keyboard does show as if I was typing.
Has anybody had this? Do you know how to fix it? this email teaser is killing me
Hello. I have the same problem like Dan:
- updated to OS4
- and I just get “blank mails”.
Would be perfect, if someone could help me.
I have a different problem with my 3GS that occured tonight. When I go into ‘mail’ it shows the inbox screen then approximately 2 seconds later it closes and I return to the front page - or whatever it is called (I’m not very iphone vocab savvy). I have tried turning the phone off and on again and reinstalling my email account (lagoon.nc in New Caledonia) but the problem remains.
I would be interested in any help I can get!!
Have a similar problem as well. Upgraded to OS4 on 3GS. Three email accounts tracked. On old OS I would get an alert when I got a new email. Now I don’t get an alert anymore. Must have alerts!!! Do work primarily thru phone so this is a must. The only way to see get to new mail is to shut down and restart phone which is not acceptable. Would love some help if anyone can assist. Thanky!!!!