Xs mail app draining battery

[MichelleAK]

This is a slightly strange problem. Yesterday, I noticed that the battery on my Xs was draining faster than normal, with normal light usage. I checked to see what app was doing the damage, and my mail app was 79 percent of the activity, almost all in the background. Today, it is 86 percent of total activity, also nearly all in the background. Before yesterday, it was running around 15-17 percent. I checked various settings, and can't find any reason for the dramatic upswing in the past two days. The battery is still showing 100 percent capacity and peak performance capacity. It's just that Mail seems to be drawing battery power nearly constantly.

Any ideas on what the issue could be? Is anyone else having this issue? It's disturbing that all of a sudden, the mail app seems to be pulling 5 times the normal amount of battery for no discernible reason.

 

[C DM]

Sounds like there might be something off with a mail account perhaps. Have you tried any troubleshooting in relation to the Mail app or any mail accounts?

 

[alpi123]

You ever thought of disabling background app activity?

 

[MichelleAK]

Sounds like there might be something off with a mail account perhaps. Have you tried any troubleshooting in relation to the Mail app or any mail accounts?

Only in a cursory fashion. It just started happening Wednesday, so I checked to make sure none of the settings had changed. When it happened again yesterday, I thought I'd check here to see if anyone else had noticed the same issue.

You ever thought of disabling background app activity?

It is already disabled. It's just Mail that's the culprit. Since I'm not sure if it is a single mail account that's causing this (I have three synced), I am now going to turn off "fetch" on them individually. I'm going to start with my Yahoo mail account, since that seems to me the most likely offender, and see if that helps. Any other suggestions are definitely welcome!

 

[chabig]

Any ideas on what the issue could be?

I don't believe you have a problem at all. Think about what you said. You said your phone had "normal light usage". Battery use by application is reported as a percentage of total use. So if you are only using the phone "lightly" it shouldn't be a surprise that any single app (Mail, in this case) represents the majority of your use.
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It's disturbing that all of a sudden, the mail app seems to be pulling 5 times the normal amount of battery for no discernible reason

I think that's the wrong way to interpret the numbers you see, for the reason stated above.

 

[C DM]

I don't believe you have a problem at all. Think about what you said. You said your phone had "normal light usage". Battery use by application is reported as a percentage of total use. So if you are only using the phone "lightly" it shouldn't be a surprise that any single app (Mail, in this case) represents the majority of your use.
[doublepost=1546617896][/doublepost]
I think that's the wrong way to interpret the numbers you see, for the reason stated above.

I guess it would be good to see the actual time associated with the usage. But it sounds like there's quite a bit of background usage that isn't typical and that's what likely prompted the question.

 

[MichelleAK]

I guess it would be good to see the actual time associated with the usage. But it sounds like there's quite a bit of background usage that isn't typical and that's what likely prompted the question.

Exactly. Starting on Wednesday, my overall battery usage each day jumped around 20 percent, and it seems to be entirely related to the Mail app using more of it. For example, by "light usage," I mean I use around 30-35 percent of my battery per day. Recently, most of that has been one single game (nearly all "screen time"), with Mail coming in 2nd or 3rd, but at around 17 percent. In the last two days, Mail has jumped up to 80-85 percent, and my battery usage has jumped to around 60 percent per day. This is with basically the same "screen time" from the past 10 days, of 3-6 minutes. It's the "background" use by Mail that has jumped from around 3 hours a day to over 6 hours a day.

Since I turned off "Fetch" for Yahoo mail before I unplugged my phone this morning, Mail doesn't (yet) seem to be drawing down the battery as much. However, it's only been an hour, so I'll keep an eye on it throughout the day. Hopefully, that's the issue. If so, it's not a big deal for me to manually pull Yahoo emails.

 

[C DM]

Exactly. Starting on Wednesday, my overall battery usage each day jumped around 20 percent, and it seems to be entirely related to the Mail app using more of it. For example, by "light usage," I mean I use around 30-35 percent of my battery per day. Recently, most of that has been one single game (nearly all "screen time"), with Mail coming in 2nd or 3rd, but at around 17 percent. In the last two days, Mail has jumped up to 80-85 percent, and my battery usage has jumped to around 60 percent per day. This is with basically the same "screen time" from the past 10 days, of 3-6 minutes. It's the "background" use by Mail that has jumped from around 3 hours a day to over 6 hours a day.

Since I turned off "Fetch" for Yahoo mail before I unplugged my phone this morning, Mail doesn't (yet) seem to be drawing down the battery as much. However, it's only been an hour, so I'll keep an eye on it throughout the day. Hopefully, that's the issue. If so, it's not a big deal for me to manually pull Yahoo emails.

Strange, even the daily 3 hour background usage of Mail sounds like quite a bit. I use Mail throughout the day (although for not too long each time) and I don't think I have more than a few minutes of background usage per day typically.

 

[MichelleAK]

Just wanted to post a quick follow up. After turning off "Fetch" for two of my three email accounts that feed into Mail, Mail's battery usage went back to normal. I don't have any explanation for the reason (maybe the recent update?) Mail's Fetch option became a battery hog, but turning it off seems to have worked. Thanks for the replies!