Thanks for your info. I took a look at a few of the other discussions after searching per your comment, but most of them seem to have a different IMAP problem than what I'm experiencing. I deleted my cox email account on the iphone, I deleted the mail app, I turned off the phone, I turned it on, reinstalled the mail app and tried to set up the cox.net email account. The phone doesn't even give me an option to set up IMAP. It automatically sets it up as POP. I can get my gmail as IMAP and used to be able to get IMAP with cox.net, but for another reason that's separate from this issue, I deleted the mail app and that's when this particular problem occurred. When I looked at some of the other search results, I found another one of yours where you recommended, "the FIX, is to delete the email ID off of the apple software on the phone, and then Re-Add it. then it will re-write the corrupted CFG file causing the issue, and it should start working again. " Is that different than what I did re deleting the mail app and cox email account? Is there something else I need to delete? thanks