iCloud Years later, and Mail app for iPhone still does not auto-sync unread badge notification with Mac

[sniffies]

Marked new mail as read on Mac, but iPhone and iPhone Mirroring still show unread badge (even hours later).

Tim, do you think you could perhaps address this decade-old issue in iOS 19 once and for all?? Or should I ask Taylor and Barbra to ask you?

Thanks.

P.S. I'm using Apple Mail app with @icloud.com address.

iOS 9
iOS 10
iOS 11
iOS 12
iOS 13
iOS 14
iOS 15
iOS 16
iOS 17
iOS 18 beta

and counting

 

[exi]

I was hoping you would get more posts to this. I switched away from iCloud years ago for a few reasons, the silent filtering being one, this being another.

 

[bradbomb]

What do you mean read status auto sync doesn't work? I'm on iOS 13 and if I read an email on my iCloud email on my iPhone and go to my iPad, the email is marked as read there.

 

[FNH15]

What do you mean read status auto sync doesn't work? I'm on iOS 13 and if I read an email on my iCloud email on my iPhone and go to my iPad, the email is marked as read there.

Exactly. It’s worked fine for me since the iOS 5 dev beta which introduced iCloud.

 

[jsamuelson]

I think what he means is that email doesn't seem to sync in the background without you launching Mail. And then let's not even talk about the lag between notifications and then refreshing the actual inbox. I spend enough time staring at mail seemingly doing nothing that I'm seriously thinking about trying a third party client.

 

[mrochester]

My problem with iCloud email was I’d read an email on one device but the notification to say I had a new email remained on my other devices. Apparently it’s supposed to work that way which seems very bizarre to me.

 

[bradbomb]

My problem with iCloud email was I’d read an email on one device but the notification to say I had a new email remained on my other devices. Apparently it’s supposed to work that way which seems very bizarre to me.

If you have notifications on (which I do not for mail), they will only disappear from all devices linked through iCloud if you actually interact with the notification I believe

 

[Apple_Robert]

If you have notifications on (which I do not for mail), they will only disappear from all devices linked through iCloud if you actually interact with the notification I believe

If the app on device B is not already open, I can understand having to open the app to allow it to sync and remove the badge count. what is frustrating, is when the app on device B is already open on another Apple device and still does not sync in the background.

 

[rambo47]

After updating to iOS15 I have noticed my iPhone 11 Pro Max takes a long time to check for new mail and sync with my accounts. Before updating I would delete an email on my iMac and it would almost instantaneously disappear from my iPhone. Now it can take several minutes, and a few emails have not synced after deletion even after 5 minutes. Read/Unread status also does not sync for several minutes. Sometimes not at all.

I LOVED the way it worked previously. I was dialed in and had all my Macs operating on the same page. I haven't had a complain with Apple updates in many years ---- until now. This blows.

 

[ThisBougieLife]

If I leave Mail open in the background, syncing seems to be better, but yeah, I've always had the issue where it will say I have "1 unread" for like five minutes after actually reading them all. This has been an ongoing issue for years and didn't start with iOS 14 or 15 for me, same thing with the Mail app on macOS sometimes taking a long time to close down.

 

[exi]

As per this Apple page (2022-01-31 edit - KB article down, see here for a 2020 Internet Archive save of the page) which is now archived and static since April 2020, this is all a known and intended issue (which we knew, of course). Posting to keep track and help clarify for anyone reading this later.

Want it to change? All we can do is submit iCloud feedback.

 

[tbaer]

As per this Apple page which is now archived and static since April 2020, this is all a known and intended issue (which we knew, of course). Posting to keep track and help clarify for anyone reading this later.

Want it to change? All we can do is submit iCloud feedback.

Thank you for sharing this KB. At least we have something to go by to refer when we report Apple Product feedback as suggested above.

This drove me to Outlook.com emails for now but I really want to move back to iCloud email once this background read email status gap has been addressed which may be never. Just wondering how do Apple employees work with this when getting hundreds of emails a day. Constantly looking at outdated email badges on the phone. Just bizarre

 

[exi]

I've edited my post just above since at some point in the last few months, Apple has taken down the KB page mentioned. I dug up an Internet Archive save of it.

This is technically possible to do. For example, in July 2015, Fastmail deployed push updating of folder statuses which easily takes care of this issue and was only able to do so by working with Apple engineering.

 

[Dancin-Ted-Danson]

Thank you for sharing this KB. At least we have something to go by to refer when we report Apple Product feedback as suggested above.

This drove me to Outlook.com emails for now but I really want to move back to iCloud email once this background read email status gap has been addressed which may be never. Just wondering how do Apple employees work with this when getting hundreds of emails a day. Constantly looking at outdated email badges on the phone. Just bizarre

When I was working there we didn't use the same service that iCloud used. We had a separate IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV setup for our @apple.com addresses. Badges/unread count refreshed behind the scenes correctly.

This particular issue has me testing out fastmail now for my personal email since iCloud and Outlook.com don't update within the mail app unless you open up the app.

 

[exi]

When I was working there we didn't use the same service that iCloud used. We had a separate IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV setup for our @apple.com addresses. Badges/unread count refreshed behind the scenes correctly.

This particular issue has me testing out fastmail now for my personal email since iCloud and Outlook.com don't update within the mail app unless you open up the app.

Still a Fastmail user because of this issue. Does anybody know of anything different with iCloud these days? Have finally purchased my own domain -- a natural time to rethink how I handle personal information such as my email setup -- and continue on with Fastmail as opposed to iCloud largely because of this issue (other power user features of FM aside).

I wonder why your internal Apple email address functioned normally, yet iCloud public addresses do not.

 

[Dancin-Ted-Danson]

Still a Fastmail user because of this issue. Does anybody know of anything different with iCloud these days? Have finally purchased my own domain -- a natural time to rethink how I handle personal information such as my email setup -- and continue on with Fastmail as opposed to iCloud largely because of this issue (other power user features of FM aside).

I wonder why your internal Apple email address functioned normally, yet iCloud public addresses do not.

I’d have to guess it’s because internal email ran on a whole difference structure and system (this could have changed in the past few years though). Configuring our company email addresses was similar to setting up fastmail… you could manually set each server address for each service (mail/contacts/calendar) or a profile would be installed when you enrolled your AOU device into AppleConnect (similar to the fastmail profile). I’d have to guess the version of imap we ran on was different then whatever was running on iCloud.

 

[exi]

Just for the hell of it, I tried all of this again through iCloud and custom email domains out of curiosity. No surprise, but the lack of status synchronization continues.

I wish Apple would either support this as would be expected for a push email service or, which they'll likely never do, state why it isn't supported.

(For those wanting to submit feedback / a RFE, the Apple page is here; I suppose emailing the tcook or other higher-up public email addresses floating around to get something to higher levels is an option, though who knows if any of it will do any good. Can't hurt to try.)

 

[sniffies]

Almost year 2024, still no "fix"

 

[AL2TEACH]

still no "fix"

I gave up sometime ago and now I just use the desktop to open mail. I haven't opened mail app on the phone or iPad in a very long time.

 

[jedimasterkyle]

I'm finding that my tolerance and patience for iCloud mail is waning thin. On top of this particular issue, I'm now running into an issue that is more annoying than the lack of background sync and refresh.

iCloud mail decided to make new folders based on the rules I have setup on iCloud.com. For example, any emails from my bank, I have a rule setup to put any and all email from my bank into my banking folder. I have 10+ years of emails in that folder because I'm a hoarder. But now iCloud thinks that I need a new folder, with the same name, and it's now sending any new emails from my bank to this new folder that I dont want or need in the first place.

I've deleted this folder that iCloud keeps creating numerous times but it's just not getting it. I'm begrudgingly thinking about switching to hotmail or something because iCloud mail keeps fighting me and infuriating me to no end. The only reason I haven't done that yet is because I have over 200 accounts that use my iCloud email address and thinking about switching all of those accounts to a new email makes me cry...

 

[exi]

Here we are, several years after the creation of this thread, with unfortunately the same small but real modern usability issues. If it took years for custom domains to come to iCloud, who knows? Maybe one day, this functionality (and no more silent filtering concerns) will come to the service.

I was recently looking at how iCloud is used for everything except my mail/contacts/calendars, which are with Fastmail. A guy can hope.

 

[Chris60549]

Apple, please fix this.