Option not to download all mails

[probono]

Use case:
Users with slow connection and/or Live CDs.

Suggested behavior:
User clicks a checkmark [x] Online mode (don't download messages)
Initially, only the headers of the most recent 100 messages are downloaded
Only once the user clicks on a header, the body is downloaded
The rest of the messages is searchable via IMAP, headers and bodies are downloaded as needed like above

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

I am wary of a literal online mode. A fundamental design decision is to have no networking in the user interface because lags are painful. Even more so if you target in particular users with a slow connection.

I set a limit of fetching the last 500 messages now, which greatly improves the situation and still is a lot. Note that important, ie. starred messages and new messages are not affected by the limitation and ancient starred messages will always be available.

[Nirpius (nirpius)]

This will be extremely helpful for inboxes with large amounts of mail. For instance, postler has spent that last 2 days trying to download the headers for my gmail account and still hasn't got up to the most recent.

I know this is linked with other issues such as downloading oldest first and a slow download rate but if we had the only last x mails options this other problem could be circumvented.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

We do have an effective limit on the number of messages, it is a bug that apparently for some people the order is wrong and/ or it fetches more messages than it should. I wasn't able to figure out where that comes from.

[Simone Tolotti (simontol)]

Postler is actually trying to download 13934 mail headers from my gmail account...

[mashimom (mashimom)]

I believe the best approach would be to download by date like a 7 day window would be enough. (Not sure if the protocol allows that)