Software · guide

How to update email password on iPhone, and the other one

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 9 min read

You changed the password on your provider’s website, and now the phone asks for it every twenty minutes. How to update email password on iphone is a short answer with one field in it — and two things around it that decide whether the afternoon goes well.

Settings › Apps › Mail › Mail Accounts › the account › Account › Password

That is the field. Before you use it, the warning Apple puts at the top of both of its pages on this, because the shortcut people are usually pointed at is to delete the account and add it back.

So: change the password in place. Deleting and re-adding is the heavier instrument, and Apple’s own wording covers both — changed account settings, not only deleted ones, can take downloaded mail with them.

Then the part that turns a two-minute job into an evening. The password you just set may not be the password the Mail app is asking for.

That second card is the one that turns a wrong assumption into a lost afternoon. If your provider has two-step verification switched on, the account is arranged so that a password alone is not enough. Apple’s answer is not a trick on the phone: it is that you “might need a special password” — one the provider issues for this purpose — and it points you at them, because that password is theirs to give rather than yours to choose. The name on your provider’s settings screen may be “two-step” or “two-factor” and it does not tell you which arrangement you have — two-factor and two-step has the difference, and the reason Google and Microsoft use the words interchangeably.

It is worth knowing this exists before you spend an hour convinced you are mistyping. A correct password can be refused for a reason that has nothing to do with what you typed. Apple’s phrasing is careful and worth taking literally: you “might need a special password or might need to request authorization from your email provider to send and receive email on your device.” Two different arrangements, both of which live on the provider’s site rather than on the phone.

One provider publishes exactly what that “special password” is, and one consequence of it that belongs on this page. Google calls it an app password — “a 16-digit passcode that gives a less secure app or device permission to access your Google Account” — and says it exists only on accounts that have 2-Step Verification turned on. The part that matters here is what happens when you do the very thing this guide is about: “To help protect your account, we revoke your app passwords when you change your Google Account password.” So on a Google account, changing the password can stop a second password you had forgotten existed, and the new account password will not stand in for it — a new app password has to be created. Google adds a note worth reading before creating one at all: “iPhones and iPads with iOS 11 or up don’t require app passwords. Instead use ‘Sign in with Google.’” That is Google describing Google accounts; another provider’s arrangement may differ, and the place to ask is that provider.

The first of those three is the one that saves the most effort, because it decides which half of the problem you have. Mail that will not send and mail that will not arrive are separate faults with separate Apple pages behind them, and an Outbox that does not exist tells you the sending half is working before you touch a single setting.

One last thing about where the account came from, because it changes what is at stake. Apple’s warning about downloaded mail matters most on accounts that keep their only copy on the device. If the account leaves everything on the server, removing it and adding it back costs you a download. If it pulled the mail down and stopped keeping a copy on the server, the messages on that phone are the archive. Knowing which you have is worth the two minutes it takes to look, and it is the difference between an inconvenience and a loss.

The guides below take it four ways: the field itself, the password that is not your password, the checks that cost nothing, and the mail that arrives late rather than not at all.

Not covered here. It will not tell you to delete the account and add it back as the first move. Apple warns twice that changed or deleted account settings can take downloaded mail with them, and a backup will not have it.

It will not pretend a refused password means you typed it wrong. Two-step verification makes a correct password insufficient by design, and the fix is issued by the provider.

And it will not send you to a mail app to solve a password problem. The account is the same account whichever program reads it, and a new app inherits the same refusal. What holds instead is simple: the warning about downloaded mail and the two-step verification note are Apple’s own, quoted with the Outbox and Undo Send diagnostics.