How To Fix a Broken Mail App in iPhone

March 3, 2008 · View Comments

in Tips, iPhone

So I just upgraded to iPhone 1.1.4 using ZiPhone 2.5 and everything seems to be working as expected until I tried Mail. It just opens and closes! One solution that was confirmed to be working is to restore back to 1.1.4 through iTunes, let ZiPhone do its magic again, and in iTunes, instead of selecting to backup from your previous iPhone select New. That should only take 10 mins but it means re-syncing data and re-installing apps again. Luckily, I found an easy fix.

1) Download OpenSHH in iPhone (make sure it’s ON by using Services or Boss Prefs).
2) Open Fugu on your Mac and connect to your iPhone.
3) You may get an error message “Warning: Remote Host Identification Has Changed”. If so, you won’t be able to connect. If not, skip to step 7.
4) On your Mac, click on the User/Home folder and hit CMD+Shift+G and type “.ssh”.
5) Delete the “known host” file.
6) Go back to Fugu and connect to your iPhone.
7) Go to var/mobile/Library/Mail.
8) Right click on Mail to set the permission to 777 or simply check all selection boxes.

You should now be able to open Mail on your iPhone!

Related Posts

  • Some people have been having problems with the Mail.app rules in Leopard. Mail filtering rules somehow don't seem to be working the way they should. I opened a file in ~/Library/Mail called MessageRules.plist. This file contains all the rules you've created, as well as the Apple-provided rules (eg. junk mail rules and News from Apple). What I noticed was that this file also contained very old rules that I had created, but were not visible in the rules list in Mail.app.

    My hunch was that the file had become corrupt. So I removed it, as well as MessageRules.plist.backup in that same directory, and restarted Mail. I made some new rules and they worked. I actually think this issue may have started before I upgraded to Leopard, so it's worth a shot in Tiger as well.
  • @Jamie

    That's great.

    I heard there is another solution using Boss Prefs on a 2.x iPhone. Click on "More" and then "Fix User Dir Permission".

    I haven't tried it yet though. =)
  • eddie
    thank you!!! it worked fine for me on a unlocked 1.1.3 iphone Muchas Gracias!!!
  • Jamie
    Sorry forgot to say this fixed mail app on 2.0.1 (5B108) 1st Gen
  • Jamie
    Perfect mate... was starting to get annoying
  • Steve
    Brilliant - many thanks!
  • shawn
    how do i do this in windows?
  • david
    Worked like a charm. Cheers
  • reese
    this didnt work for me...is there any other things i can try?
  • laxking
    Worked perfectly, thank you so much! Thought I was going to have to sync everything again.
blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: