I was asked to look at a family member’s iPad because the mail app was opening and then closing immediately, completely unusable. There were 26 thousand unread messages according to the badge on the icon which may have be part of the problem here!

A quick google search suggested a number of troubleshooting steps such as closing the app, changing settings from push to fetch and adjust frequencies, removing the app and re-installing, remove and re-setting the account and my personal favourite, emailing support :-). At first it looked like closing the app (double press of the home button and swipe closing or some other force closing method, I don’t use an iPad) had worked. The app stayed open for longer than before but them bang, it closed again a minute later.

After wading through a frustrating number of advert ladened “support” sites I gave up through that route and instead took a closer look at the settings. Through trial and error I managed to get to a solution. I don’t recall this being listed as a step on the sites I’d looked at so I’ll note it here. I changed the mail preview setting (in Settings > Mail > Preview) from 2 lines to none and this seemed to sort the crashing problem out, at least in this instance, your mileage may vary etc…