I use Mail.app on both iPhone and Mac, and every time I get a new email, there’s at least a 90% chance that the Inbox is not the right place for it, and a 89.7% chance that Sanebox will take care of it.
However, Mail will still notify me of it.
What this looks like to me is that there’s a hidden mail somewhere, and I can’t get to it. The only way to make this work is by resyncing all accounts on the mac, or killing the app and restarting it on iPhone.
I do this MANY times a day, and I am sick and tired of it.
Help!
Obviously I can just disable notifications, but that’s no good either, because that 10% is actually important.
So what I need is a way to either disable notifications for the first few seconds an email is in my Inbox, or I need a way to get notified without using the Mail.app notifications.
The notifications are most important on the iPhone - I can live fine without having notifications on the mac.
An alternative to Sanebox would also work - but I’ve already paid for the next year, and I would hate to spend weeks to retrain a new tool, so that alternative would have to be really good ;p
An alternative to Mail.app is not on the table - I’ve tried them all, and they’re just not good enough.
You don’t mention who your email provider is, but I am assuming it is one which supports push notifications (if not, the second paragraph below may still be relevant). In my observation, Mail.app doesn’t update until it receives a new push notification and as push notifications are not sent for moved/deleted/read messages, any client which was not used to move/delete/read a message does not get updated until you open it and/or otherwise force an update. I have always assumed that the issue could be solved by turning push notifications off and relying on polling/fetching. With fetching, the client app checks the server for updates on a regular interval instead of relying on the server to send updates. So, with fetching, Mail.app should theoretically update once every interval. Of course, that means that you may have a delay in being notified of those important (perhaps time sensitive) emails. It depends on whether they are received by the email server shortly before or after the most recent fetch request was made. You can increase the frequency of fetch requests (by setting the number of minutes between each request) for most clients, but your provider may have a limit on how many they are willing to receive so you don’t want to overdo it. At least on the phone, the minimum option is 15 minutes. I don’t recall what the Mac offers for options and it will be a few hours before I can check.
To access the push/fetch settings on the phone, go to Settings > Mail > Accounts > Fetch New Data. From that screen you can turn “Push” on/off globally. You can also configure each separate account. The global push setting is ignored by accounts that either don’t support it or are manually configured to use fetch. Finally, at the bottom you can set the Fetch interval for any account which uses “fetch.” Note that the default option is “Automatically,” which apparently means a fetch request is made only when your device is plugged in and on Wi-Fi (both conditions must be met). It would seem that that means that when you are carrying the phone around with you during the day (not plugged in) it falls back to “manually,” which is probably not what anyone wants. And it is not clear to me how often fetches are made when the conditions for “Automatically” are met (only once when plugged in or on some unconfigurable interval?). You probably want to select one of the time intervals. Note, however, that an explanatory comment on that setting screen warns that more frequent fetches will drain your battery more quickly. But a longer interval will result in longer delays between updates. And that, I suppose, is why push is the default behavior.
Edit: Can confirm this solved my problem! Thanks again!
I suppose it wouldn’t work if I was one of those people who has to know the very second something happens, but thankfully even my company (est. 1860) have moved away from sending anything actually urgent in an email )
)