This topic

BT Broadband customer with EE mobile…Mail takes hours/days to reach iPhone?

essjay — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:35:42 GMT

I am a BT Broadband customer and recently had a 6 week stay in hospital. The hospital wifi was terrible so I contacted BT to get unlimited data on my BT mobile. I was told that was not possible with BT, but would be possible by transferring my mobile account to EE which I duly did, and the BT guy arranged an EE (virtual) sim for my iPhone.

The problem I now have is that my btinternet.com (IMAP) email takes an absolute age to reach my iPhone, if at all. Sometimes email will arrive on my phone within hours of seeing it via wifi on my iPad, sometimes the next day, or sometimes it never appears. I’ve not changed any of my IMAP settings on my phone, and they are identical to the settings on my iPad. Webmail works fine for all i/c emails.

Any ideas?

Re: BT Broadband customer with EE mobile…Mail takes hours/days to reach iPhone?

Peter_W — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:59:29 GMT

Thanks for reaching out to us about this, @essjay

Just out of curiosity, how is the connection otherwise, for example if you're streaming video and music or loading web pages?

Hospitals aren't often known for offering the best mobile coverage due to the dense buildings with a lot of competing electrical equipment, so there's a chance this could be playing a role.

Peter

Re: BT Broadband customer with EE mobile…Mail takes hours/days to reach iPhone?

essjay — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:18:28 GMT

Hi, thanks for the reply. While I was in hospital the wifi wasn’t the best, but after I’d swapped over to EE unlimited everything was working fine with the exception of my btinternet IMAP email, which was, and still is, very sporadic to say the least. Incoming email to the btinternet mail address is pretty instant on my ipad using my BT broadband wifi, but can take hours sometimes to appear on my iphone even using the same wifi.

I do have a separate gmail account, and anyone using that to send me mail works fine and comes through pretty instantly. I reckon a call to the EE helpdesk might be my next move and see if they can come up with a solution.

Steve

Re: BT Broadband customer with EE mobile…Mail takes hours/days to reach iPhone?

Peter_W — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:23:25 GMT

Cheers @essjay

So just to be sure, if you use the same WiFi with your phone that your iPad is using, do the emails still arrive late?

Peter

Re: BT Broadband customer with EE mobile…Mail takes hours/days to reach iPhone?

essjay — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:12:30 GMT

Yes Peter, with both the phone and ipad on the same BT broadband WiFi the ipad will get the emails, but the phone won’t even with a refresh of the mail app. They usually arrive on the phone a few hours after, however I have had some that have never arrived.

Steve

Re: BT Broadband customer with EE mobile…Mail takes hours/days to reach iPhone?

Katie_B — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 07:40:12 GMT

Thanks so much for confirming @essjay.

I'd recommend giving us a call so our team can look into this further.

It would be great if you could keep us updated.

Katie

Re: BT Broadband customer with EE mobile…Mail takes hours/days to reach iPhone?

essjay — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:42:35 GMT

One thing I did forget to mention is that I do sometimes get the “Cannot Get Mail” warning although, as I say the IMAP settings are the same as the iPad and if they were wrong then surely I would never get any mail. This is making me think the problem is more likely to be coming from EE trying to access the BT mail server.