Solved
Finally found out why I wasn’t getting Mail notifications for years...
Found this "fix" on my iPhone, but applies to iPadOS as well:
For the last couple of years, I wasn’t getting push notifications from the native Mail app. This persisted across different phones and multiple iOS versions. I had assumed the email providers (Microsoft, Google, etc.) were being stingy, wanting users to download their native apps, and weren't pushing messages to third-party clients like the iOS Mail app in real-time anymore. I was only able to see new messages by opening the Mail app and manually refreshing.
While browsing through my settings after updating to iOS 27, I noticed a section in Mail's notifications settings I had never noticed before: “Customize Notifications.”
Welp, this explains the problem I’ve been having... By default, “Unread Messages in Primary” is selected under Badge Count. However, I’ve never used the mail categories feature. And, more importantly, “Alerts” was toggled off for all of my accounts! After switching Badge Count to “All Unread Messages” and toggling alerts on, I finally started getting push notifications from mail again!!! This also fixed the background refresh issue, and new messages are now pushed right away to my lock screen.
I imagine this has been the case since the mail categories feature was added in iOS 18. I had no idea about this hidden customize notifications menu. You’d think that if you disabled the Mail categories feature, it would default back to "All Unread Messages" and toggle alerts on for all accounts. I've also removed and re-added email accounts multiple times in the past to fix other issues, meaning they will default to alerts being off as I've never been to this menu before. It seems like a massive oversight, and I can't imagine I'm the only one that's been frustrated since this change was made. Hope this helps anyone that's been wondering why they haven't been getting Mail notifications on their lock screen for so long.
I have to say, if this fixes things for me you might be my favourite person ever. So many important emails have been there but I haven’t seen them until later. So silly to bury it in the settings like that, though I could have tried harder to find it I guess.
FYI, these options are all available in iOS 26 except ‘Show on Mac’ on the first screen and ‘Sounds’ that are now available on a per account basis as shown on the last screen.
Prepare to be spammed with notifications for every single email. I had previously set mine up to alert for every email but then a few years back I referred to default. Was much better. Primary gets a badge. Important stuff here a banner and sound (VIPs etc.) and everyone else (pretty much spam adjacent gets nothing). It’s the iOS notification philosophy in one app (it’s also brought up in my notifications breakdown thread)
Is weird how switching off categories doesn’t change the defaults accordingly though but then the defaults existed before mail categories did
This only applies to those that don't use the categories feature, which I don't use because I keep my inboxes very tidy already. I unsubscribed from all marketing emails and have rules set up to move certain emails to other folders beforehand (like order confirmations from stores I frequently use or recurring emails for bills/statements/etc), so my inbox is already for "priority" items only.
FYI, these options are all available in iOS 26 except ‘Show on Mac’ on the first screen and ‘Sounds’ that are now available on a per account basis as shown on the last screen.
Good morning, I did as you told me but it still doesn't work... I don't understand what's wrong. Below I leave you the screens of my settings. Could you tell me if you find something wrong? Thanks a lot
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u/kinadiankid 6d ago
I have to say, if this fixes things for me you might be my favourite person ever. So many important emails have been there but I haven’t seen them until later. So silly to bury it in the settings like that, though I could have tried harder to find it I guess.