Thanks for your input. It is not a restart issue, it simply doesn't work, waiting to hear back from Black VPN. Reading around there are other providers that have difficulty accessing Gmail and Hidemyass has a white list of IP addresses but due to there being so many, they cannot add them all

I set up 2 step verification as suggested on a forum, but no dice, still does not work.

It's not that iOS will not connect to all mail over VPN, works for me.com mail, just not Gmail

Cheers