Can't get email notifications on lock screen — what am I forgetting?

TidBITS Talk
1

My wife complained to me that she wasn’t getting notifications on her lock screen when new emails came in.

I checked her iPhone. Latest iOS version and Mail was indeed showing a badge for new email. But nothing in notification center and of course nothing on lock screen either. She has Mail set up to check various personal and work email accounts including iCloud and push has been set to on. The fact that Mail shows a badge when new email comes in, tells me that part is working.

I checked her notification settings and I see nothing in there that would be set up wrong. She has allowed Mail notifications and for alerts she has both Lock Screen and Notification Center selected. I have the exact same notification settings as far as I can tell and my Mail puts notifications on my lock screen just fine. But she’s not getting any there and worse yet, she’s not even getting new emails to show up in her Notification Center despite Mail’s badge telling her that new email is waiting.

I checked notification settings, Mail’s notification settings, and could not find any other lock screen settings related to this. But I must be forgetting some setting somewhere else. Any ideas?

2

Did you look under the Customize Notification subsection in Notification > Mail?

3

Yep. Checked there too. Nothing turned off in there related to notifications or lock screen.

4

Does she have an Apple Watch? I think notifications show up there when the iPhone screen is locked.

5

I’m afraid that’s not it either. No Apple Watches in our household.

6

@Simon I’ve been having generally similar issues with syncing and notifications for Messages and Mail, across devices and various OSes.

For iPhone, check the Face ID & Passcode Settings > Allow Access When Locked section and confirm settings are as desired. Consider turning off, waiting and or rebooting and set to desired again.

Messages synced a bit better for me when I logged out of iMessaging within the app then back in. Maybe that helps with Mail also.

I vaguely recall something about Notifications settings in iCloud that can be set thru a browser. If you use that maybe check there (or I could be thinking of something else).

Hope that’s helpful!

7

I can see nothing in there related to displaying a single notification.
That said, her settings in there are as mine, but I have no trouble getting new email notifications on my lock screen.

8

I have had issues with notifications when I am logged onto my iCloud account on multiple devices (desktop, laptop, iPad, watch). Apple, I think, tries not to put the notification on everything so tries to guess where I want it. Apple doesn’t often guess correctly.

9

So out of despair I told here to reboot her iPhone. And after that, indeed she now got a lock screen notification for email on one of her accounts.

But still, when I send her an email to her personal iCloud account, she gets no notification at all. Not on lock screen, not in Notification Center.

I just don’t get how there can even be a difference between various email accounts. The settings are identical for all of them. Gosh! How can iOS be this complicated? :rofl: