Fastmail app and offline access
 

I just got done with a trip, flying 14+ hours each way. I was expecting that the fastmail app would work on the plane... To my great surprise, the fastmail app provides no offline access. All my boarding passes wee in there. Thankfully I still had k9 installed, and it had synced in the background.

This thing really needs offline access...

Yes, desperately needed. That's the reason I'm not switched yet.

Before I travel somewhere I always save important attachments to a separate app such as Documents (by Readdle, on iPhone) or equivalent file storage app. I also save them to Dropbox and select them as available offline in the app so it caches them on my phone. I also manually pull-to-refresh the relevant mail folders in the default IMAP-based mail app on my iPhone (called Mail) and make sure it finishes syncing.

It would be nice if the Fastmail app cached enough local storage to be reliable but it doesn't/isn't. I love its interface and gestures so I always use it by preference, but having a conventional IMAP email app as a back-up, and copying important files to offline locations on the phone is good redundancy.

The same applies to me. In my case, I need to use the calendar when offline and then get online to sync it.

Does anyone know if there's any ETA for this?

It's our #1 feature request for the apps - believe me when I say we're very aware of it. It's going to require quite a few changes in both the webapp itself and in the server backend. We're working on some of those pieces at the moment, but not all of them are priorities yet.

I don't have an ETA for you. You shouldn't expect it this year though. I would personally hope to see something in the second half of next year, but that's not much more than a guess right now.

how about a fix for the lag and redraw problems on android? So annoying, and slow sometimes.

I'm not aware of any problems other than the rendering bugs on the Moto G 3rd gen, which we're working on.

Android app laggy.

I’m abroad now in a country with bad internet.
Nearly three years later and still no offline access. :(

Still no fix for the corruption with Android keyboard either.

This is ridiculous.

Luckily, there are plenty of free and rather nice alternatives. My personal favorite has been BlueMail.

The only way you can get FastMail's attention these days is via support tickets. When they receive many of these on a particular issue, it eats up support resources and raises its priority.

This is worth a bump :-)

A typical support desk answer.

Hmmm. Not *that* typical, right? Or why does Pobox Support answer your question sent to FastMail?


Anyway, I feel it's been a loooong time since FastMail introduced any new features to its service. Not even little ones. Why are still only Gravatar images displayed although your contacts' images are synced via CardDAV? Where is offline access for the app? I don't dare to think about things like snoozing mails, scheduled send or :eek: labels instead of folders…

FastMail and Pobox are the same company. FastMail purchased Pobox and Listbox nearly 3 years ago:
https://fastmail.blog/2015/11/03/fas...x-and-listbox/

And Pobox is using the same app (and webmail) as FastMail for their Mailstore (mailbox) accounts.

Just came across this artice.
And do not forget they worked on new service called Topicbox.

I'm aware of that, but I doubt that everybody is (especially people not following the EMD forum). And as they keep acting like two independent services outside, I find this some kind of … well, unprofessional.

Maybe somone shoud teach them how to use the identities feature… ;)

That's nice – thanks for sharing this, Berenburger!

I agree with you. It's so long since they released new features to their service. While, Gmail is updating their features more frequently and have all features you just mentioned for FREE or ~US$22 (100GB Storage annual), I do believe it's much worthy. FM needs to move faster if they don't want to lose the competition.

Dude, BlueMail stores your email on their own servers before delivering it to your phone. Are you happy with that? :confused:

I hope you are joking... otherwise I'd ask if you even know how email works?

What about my statement is confusing?

What I’m referring to is that the app takes email off, for example, the FM server and stores a copy on its own servers (and bear in mind it’s not an email provider itself) before passing to your phone. So the app isn’t logging in to FM - the company behind it is.

That’s not how email usually works. It’s pretty unusual in my view. Maybe not to you.

Aaaah... Gotcha. That makes more sense to me. Pretty poor if Bluemail is taking Fastmail emails and moving it to their own servers. That is a security nightmare.

Thanks for the clarification.

Yikes - do any of the "popular" apps do that? Eg Outlook, K9...

The information in this link is a few years old, but is interesting:

https://androidforums.com/threads/em...rivate.935578/

Hmm. Not so good for Outlook.

Sadly not. You can check it for FastMail by looking at your login record (which FastMail lets you review for the previous 4 weeks). BlueMail for example uses AWS to connect to FastMail's servers so it's a pretty obvious login - plus it will be from an unusual US location (for those of us who aren't in the US).

I've seen in the pass it does heaps of log-ins. And the IP address shown is somewhere in Virginia - but I'm in Australia.
So what's behind all those log-ins? Obviously it needs to be able to log in to get the email. But why so many & why the Virginia IP ? I never understood this.

I am unsure why you see log-ins from Virginia. I would try to figure out which device is involved which may allow you to identify the mail client and give you a clue.

There are often many log-ins because of the way IMAP works. Each time a separate folder is accessed, this can result in a separate log-in (depending on how the mail client works). I have seen this behaviour with the Apple IOS Mail app.

I know which App it is.
It's Outlook on my Android.

Well, it's polling for email and each time it does that will be a separate login. And the Virginia IP is likely a server farm - either Azure or AWS.

So if the MS Outlook App is bringing my FM email onto a MS server in say VA, would the email sitting on their server still be encrypted or now unencrypted?

Vis-a-vis anyone without the encryption keys (or access via your app) to that server it will be encrypted, but I suspect your email would not be encrypted on the server itself. So, Microsoft employees who have access to the server will probably have access to your email subject to the internal controls that Microsoft puts in place (which should be stringent). But the server itself will be encrypted so no-one outside of Microsoft should be able to access your email (as they won't be able to access the data on the server).

Or at least that's how I think it should work. Certainly MS could encrypt your own email separately if they wanted to, but that's usually a premium offering for cloud services. But it's what Proton Mail does. It plays havoc with IMAP though.

@robn and anyone else still tracking this thread

New forum user here, am looking at switching to Fastmail and visited this page which says"
I'm curious because this thread is now over 4 years old.... what's the real story with Fastmail iOS and Android apps storing some amount email on the mobile device for offline use? It seems odd that in September 2015 offline access was the #1 most requested feature....

Thanks to anyone here for any guidance.

Offline support is often requested, but it is a major undertaking. In spite of the demand, there are (I believe) two key reasons why it has yet to be implemented (and, in my view, may well never be):

1. The opportunity cost involved in shelving other enhancements and features to get offline support done.
2. Those for whom offline support is critical have other options. There are mail clients that work well with FastMail that already have offline support.

I have no insight into the Fastmail plans on this, but it’s a good question and I will ask people I know on their staff. My iPhone iOS app is the latest beta version (yes, you can change this in the iOS Settings screen for the Fastmail app), but I have seen nothing which would indicate that changes allowing offline use are underway.

One issue I can imagine is the size of email accounts these days. I have a Standard Fastmail plan which provides 25 GB of email storage. At this time I’m using a little over 15 GB of email quota in my Fastmail account. Although I have plenty of storage for all of those emails on both of my iOS devices, many users could find their devices not able to store off of their email quota. And if using a mobile cellular data service to transfer the initial message store, my guess is that many users might overload their mobile service plan and get large bills. The IMAP protocol has the concept of “subscribed” folders (which might help), but of course some people may only use their Inbox to save a huge historic message store.

So if Fastmail implements offline storage in their mobile (iOS and Android) clients, I think they might need to implement a system where you could specify a certain number of messages or a time range (such as the previous month or year) for each folder.

These days I’m rarely out of range of fast access to the internet and the current Fastmail online search is very fast, So I have little use of offline storage except for viewing recent messages when I’m in a parking garage or other location where I can’t get to their server.

I agree with the comments from BritTim.

Bill