[amluto]

I have no idea whether JMAP is any good, but I find all the hype utterly baffling. JMAP is supposedly awesome. There is real thoughtful engineering going into offline support: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-mail-storage/

And yet: at least as of a couple months ago, there isn’t actually any offline support! The Fastmail first party app does not work at all offline. Complete failure. Does not even try. Oh, and it has dramatically worse threading support than even Gmail or Outlook.

I don’t get it. POP3 is awful and kind of works offline. IMAP is old, clunky, and works fairly well offline. JMAP is supposedly the new hotness, but the paid first party experience will not even try to load offline. This is table stakes! Eudora could do this. Every version of Outlook ever could do this. Thunderbird can, and always could, do this. The usual command-line clients work offline if configured appropriately. Heck, Google went above and beyond and made Gmail’s webmail work quite well offline if you care to set it up, and I think they did a bunch of early work on service workers to make this possible. Fastmail, please stop pitching your fancy protocols until you can get your clients up to the state of the art as of twenty to thirty years ago.

edit: Huh, mobile offline support is in beta as of December 16. No way!

[radicality]

Similarly, I wish I could find some iOS mail app that allows me to have the have the full mailbox locally. I use Gmail with the Mail app on iOS, and tried multiple mail apps to try to find one that will download the whole mailbox with all attachments and let me search it locally quickly, but seems that doesn’t exist. On Mac I’m using Mailmate and liking it.

[Mailtemi]

I'm actually working on this (https://mailtemi.com/blog/storage-redesign/). After pushing Mailtemi on Android, I will continue working on full offline support.

[radicality]

That’s awesome, will check it out!

[Mailtemi]

This is just a step toward offline support. It's not available yet, because Android comes first.

The app is ready for offline use, but I don't want to implement it without 'full text search.' I plan to use SQLite FTS5. My initial tests with search show that offline search is storage-expensive, which could be problematic for mobile devices. So, the edge cases have started to appear. But it's the most requested feature, and the most interesting/challenging to me :)

[radicality]

Yeah for high-end phones with lots of storage, fully offline full text search would be really nice. Often I know that some email with a substring exists and I search for it in Mail app, and it goes off to do a server search… And when you need it most, you probably have 1 bar of range, or have no cell service and no available WiFi. Example: pulling up reservation details while traveling in a foreign country.

Or even worse, sometimes I look at some email in Mail and it’s there, and then hours later, while on bad network conditions, I look at it again and see “This email has not been fetched from the server. Download?”, which then just hangs.

I have a 1TB iPhone and a 2TB iPad. My main Gmail account is not large by any means - ~50k emails and 5GB space. Even though I have all this space on my iPhone/ipad available and willing to commit a bunch of it to email with all attachments and full text index, there seems to be no way to do it.

The Gmail app has a slider for “days of mail to sync”, but the max is 90 days, and not “All time” like one would expect. Anyways, good luck with Mailtemi!