Get New Email Faster on iPhone by Changing Fetch Settings

Want to get new emails faster on your iPhone or iPad? You can do that with a settings adjustment to how the Mail app works.

Have you noticed that it can sometimes take a while to get an email notification on to the iPhone? The time it takes to check for new emails from mail servers is actually a simple settings option for some email providers, and this means it’s easy to speed up if you want to get alerts sooner and closer to the time the message was actually received.

To clarify, this tip is for mail providers that use “Fetch” to get new data, meaning they manually check the mail server for new messages. This isn’t going to be necessary for email providers that utilize “Push”, which as it sounds, actively pushes new mail to iOS as it is received. Before beginning or making a change, you can determine which type your email service uses:

How to Check If Your Email Provider Uses Push or Fetch on iPhone or iPad

• Open Settings and tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”, then tap “Fetch New Data”
• Choose the “Advanced” option to see a list of mail accounts configured with Mail app in iOS and to see if they are using Push, Fetch, or Manual

In this screenshot, Gmail is using “Fetch” and therefore will be able to get email faster by altering the fetch settings:

How to Change Fetch Mail Settings to Get New eMail Faster on iPhone or iPad

This tip will only speeds up accounts configured to use Fetch, or for email accounts configured to check mail manually it will help a lot there too, unless you’re constantly refreshing the Mail app.

• Open Settings and choose “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
• Choose “Fetch New Data” and set Fetch to “Every 15 Minutes”

The default setting in iOS is to fetch emails hourly, but that’s really not fast enough for some users, particularly if you’re expecting something important, you’re on call for work, or if you’d just prefer to get new data as fast as possible.

There is a catch with having aggressive fetch settings however, and that is the potential to reduce battery life of the iPhone. This is made worse when the iPhone is in the wild on cellular networks, because the time it takes to open a connecting to a remote server through LTE, 3G/4G, or Edge 2G is going to vary widely depending on cell coverage, and each task runs in the background until completed. In fact, one of the common tips to improve battery life for an iPhone is the complete opposite of this, and to reduce the fetch setting to a higher interval. If battery life concerns you, be cautious of this setting, because it definitely does have an impact on how long a device will last, and you may want to change the setting according to your situation. That said, most of us keep our iPhones with us all the time and most of us aren’t too far from a charger either at work or home, so the faster mail deliveries are worth the trade off.

By the way, this isn’t going to apply quite the same to those using different mail apps for different addresses, since individual iOS apps get pushes separately that are in turn handled through Settings > Notifications, but that’s really another topic.