Just hours after Apple pushed the iOS 16.0.2 update to address several nagging bugs affecting the new iPhone 14 and early iOS 16 updaters, a strange Mail bug has been discovered that could lock users out of their email account.
Dubbed Mailjack, VPN Tracker has uncovered a bug that lets anyone take down your email account by sending a message from an improperly formatted account. VPN Tracker found that an email from an address with two quotes (“”@macworld.com for example) will cause Mail on iOS 16 to repeatedly crash.
VPN Tracker has set up a way to test the crash on your iPhone, which requires double opt-in verification to prevent pranks. The Mailjack flaw only affects Mail in iOS 16 and isn’t present on macOS, early versions of iOS, or other email clients.
To fix the crash, VPN Tracker says users are able to log into Mail on another device that isn’t running iOS 16 and delete the email: “As soon as you delete the email from your account using another device, different email client or on the web, Mail updates your inbox and stops crashing. Moving the email to a subfolder in an IMAP email account will also fix your inbox, but Mail will crash again if you navigate to that folder.”
We’ve seen strange bugs like this in the past, but they generally have to do with Messages and character strings. This one is a little more specific and more difficult to pull off as a prank, but it’s a bug that Apple is likely to fix soon. VPN Tracker says the bug persists in iOS 16.1, which is still in beta development.
Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.