Version: (using KDE KDE 3.2.2) Installed from: Gentoo Packages Compiler: gcc 3.2.2 OS: Linux In Apple Mail, there are various options for cacheing IMAP messages: cache all messages (like KMail's disconnected IMAP), cache read messages, cache read messages AND attachements.... Such a feature in KMail would be great. I keep a lot of old mail and I don't need all that cached, so I don't want to cache everything. I'm a big fan of cacheing messages I've read (up to 100K). Such a feature in KMail would be great.
Just to add that I'm a fervent KDE Desktop user, _but_ I use evolution as my mail user agent just and only just because kmail lacks this feature. Especially local caching of already read messages. Thanks for all your good work.
What is wrong with Disconnected IMAP?
What is wrong with disconnected email ? Let's take an example. I read my mail with Imap on 4 differents machines/locations. All my mail is sorted in folders, some of them are really big (+50Mb), and i do'nt want to duplicate all these datas on all my computers, but I want to be able to access it if I want to. With the standard imap mode of kmail, I don't have this problem but downloading a message each time I want to access it is not very efficient, especially with big mails.
> What is wrong with Disconnected IMAP? Additional to Renaud Duhaut. Some folders can't need on some locations. For example I have "spam" folder, some folders with technical informations and other in my corporate imap account $du -s asy 2399116 asy but only few folders need to me at home permanently. What do you think about time when I can read my mail if I recreate (because hardware crash, file system crash, OS reinstall, etc) Disconnected IMAP on my home computer with dialup 56K connection ? :-) I think what "Disconnected IMAP" and "IMAP" can be merged and cache settings can be applied per folders or global to account (both variants must present).
I think comment 4 sounds like a good idea. One could have a checkbox while setting up an imap account to have save all folders offline. If people do not chose this option, which replaces the dimap-account, they can still turn on the offline-funtionality on a per-folder basis.
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
Seems like a good place to hook my wish. Maybe an option to download mail only when they are read, or an explcit request is made to download all mail.
*** Bug 88568 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Yep, I want to express my support for comment #7: I do *not* want to wait until kmail has downloaded all the stuff (... which I don't want to read right now anyway ...), but I am extremely annoyed with the standard behaviour of the normal IMAP client of not caching anything, and downloading messages multiple times everytime I want to display them.
*** Bug 109155 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think comments 4 and 5 do exactly describe what would be a good solution. Comparable (or even better) than what e.g. Thunderbird has. In addition this could be combined with the bug #40637 for "online" folders. Replying to a mail with large attachment in a (not disconnected) IMAP folder over an 64 kbit/s connection is not much fun since the complete Mail is downloaded. Canceling the answer and doing it again will again first download the complete mail (all this even though the attachment will not be used for anything). Then viewing the attachment will again download it. So even if a folder is marked as an online folder some caching should be done. To me bug #40637 (wish) has not been fixed, yet.
I have to use disconnected IMAP if I want to store groupware folders on IMAP (see bug #122116). And because I don't want to use disconnected imap on my regular mail folder (size issues) there should be an easy way to use disconnected imap only for some folders of an account. It would be nice to have a per-folder option to cache complete mails (like current disconnected imap), cache just the body and load attachements on request or cache just the headers (like current regular imap).
for me, dIMAP is slow for two reasons: - it "acts like pop3" i.e it fetches all messages, content, attachments, etc... - it synchronizes slowly, making many connections checking thoroughly what has (not) changed and sending new message status, the latter being excruciatingly slow: it can take up to 5 seconds to upload a 'read' status of one single message (this is not due to network issues). what's more if I have a mail reading session, I must hit check 'retrieve mail' two times: - once for checking mail in - once for commiting any change I made if I want them to be seen by another client (phone, webmail) I may connect to in the meantime all of those issues make dIMAP particularly time consuming and inefficient, especially in a non-persistent, mobile connection scenario when connectivity is both varying in quality and quantity. classic IMAP in its current kmail implementation is out of question in such a use-case too, because it is totally connectivity-dependent. many bug reports have been made here to have a coherent and configurable caching solution in classic IMAP, readable offline. most of the answers were brutal bug closures (certainly due to bug triaging) or recommendations to use dIMAP. I suggest to see how e.g claws-mail handle IMAP wonderfully (I suppose, reading the above, that thunderbird behaves somehow the same), respects the offline status and allows for cached mail reading nonetheless. added to this, and more in line with the current bug report, it would be very interesting to have the possibility to define exactly what should be fetched from the imap server (headers only, headers+maximum content size, header+body+attachments or not) and at which time (upon 'check mail in' or upon actually reading the mail for which only headers would have been fetched when 'check[ing] mail in'), the full message being downloadable via a menu entry and a toolbar button.
Reassigning to kmail2. Please check KMail 2 and report back in order to update this report, thanks in advance
Kmail2 cashes mails, but the cache gets invalidated after some time (hours). It would be still nice to have options to finetune caching (I don't need Trash to stay in Cache, but I need Mails in the Inbox at least for some weeks, as long as a specific communication is active). My connection is quite slow (45kb/s), so caching is really important for traditional IMAP, DIMAP is no option as syncing would take days. Some time ago, I read a comment to a Blog post, that there is a hidden possibility, yet, but I don't remember where it was :(
One year passed and this issue still bugs me. I tried many mail clients, all of them had their own issues, but every single one did cache mails for traditional IMAP.
You can finetune the cache and you could do that "always" (no idea when it was introduced, but probably in early days of akonadi). Right click on folder, Retrieval and see the Retrieval options. You can do this per account (by changing the toplevel folder's properties) or per folder.