Quote:
Originally Posted by jaynyc
... what's the real story with Fastmail iOS and Android apps storing some amount email on the mobile device for offline use? ...
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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