Bizarre ‘mailjack’ bug can CRASH your iPhone with a single email

EXPERTS have uncovered a strange bug that is making people’s iPhone mailbox crash.

The curious case has been dubbed “mailjack” as a bad actor can effectively block you from entering your Mail app using it.

AP

Bug affects devices running iOS 16[/caption]

And it’s all to do with how the “from” field is worded and some rogue extra characters that aren’t meant to be there.

It came to light after researchers at VPN Tracker developer Equinux were inspecting spam email in iOS 16.

The team were all experiencing the same crash issue, reports 9to5Mac.

“It turns out the team had all received the same spam message,” the explained.

Usually, the email address would look something like, sender@example.com.

But instead it showed “”@example.com, which is not a normal email format.

“Anyone who has built software before knows that if there’s one thing computers don’t like, it’s weirdly formatted inputs like that,” the team continued.

“We tested sending an email from “”@example.com and sure enough – this is what is causing Mail on iOS 16 to crash, locking you out of your entire inbox.”

The problem only affects the Mail app, not others like Gmail or Outlook.

And it’s just happening to devices running iOS 16 and iOS 16.0.1 on the iPhone 14.

Fortunately, there’s a very easy fix.

All you need to do is access your email on an alternative device that’s not running iOS 16 and delete the troublesome email for good.

That way it won’t cause problems for your iPhone Mail app going forward.

It’s not the first time iOS has suffered something like this.

Back in 2018, iPhone owners were hit by the so-called Telugu text bug, which allowed other people to crash your Apple smartphone by sending a special text message.

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