Yahoo email not working with iPhone and iPad Mail app for many users, company investigating a fix

Yahoo email users have been experiencing issues with the iPhone and iPad Mail app starting around the time iOS 11 launched, but there are still no conclusive solutions. The Yahoo team posted a statement on Twitter saying that the issue is being investigated; it isn’t clear if the blame lies with Yahoo or Apple’s software. Unfortunately, the only workaround at this time is to download the Yahoo Mail app, and access email from there.

The customer support forums for Yahoo are flooded with threads like this one with complaints that the service isn’t working with the native Mail app. Yahoo users are often unable to receive or send new email, notice their inbox messages frequently disappearing from the Mail app, and are sometimes unable to login altogether – despite Yahoo Mail being a default account option when setting up Mail.

For people trying to log in for the first time, when the list of of email providers appears, tapping Yahoo will open the username and password form but it can almost never be configured. The UI simply goes back to the previous ‘Add Account’ screen. Unfortunately, even if users do manage to get through the login process, it seems a large percentage of users are facing continuous errors fetching and sending mail.

The Yahoo Mail app does work, but this is obviously not an ideal fix; there are a lot of advantages to accessing your email through the system Mail app rather than a third-party client.

Here’s Yahoo’s latest statement:

We are aware that some Yahoo Mail users are currently seeing issues when accessing their emails through a Mail app. We apologize to those affected and are working quickly to fix it. You can try using the web or Yahoo Mail app to access your email in the meantime.

The cause of the issue is murky; intuitively it doesn’t seem to be a problem on Apple’s end as other mail accounts are functioning fine. It’s only Yahoo users that are systematically reporting that their emails are not showing up. What’s more worrying is that Yahoo first acknowledged the issue in December. Two months later, people are still having problems en masse.

Hopefully, this is something that can be resolved server-side, but it could ultimately require an iOS firmware update. Apple is yet to formally comment on the problems.

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