My goal is to have a working offline copy of my email database on my phone, in case of no internet.

I know we can just go to Fetch Mail settings, choose:

  • All mails for the Mailbox size

  • Sync period to All time

But it is not as simple as that. For my case, I have around 200k emails. Using the above settings, Thunderbird would not even start to sync. The progress bar showed for like 5 seconds then hang. I made sure to check Cache / Storage size of Thunderbird after like 30 mins to see if it grows… nothing happens.

Anyone managed to do this successfully?

Note: I also tried Fairmail and got even WORSE results than Thunderbird. Nothing against Fairmail, I love how advanced the settings are. But it just would not work reliably if you have a lot of emails. For comparison, I tried to fetch like 10k emails on both Fairmail and Thunderbird. After both finjshed downloading:

  • Thunderbird: i can go Airplane mode, pick any emails and ALL contents are shown instantly. e.g. texts, attachments

  • Fairmail: Airplane mode on, pick any emails and some emails are shown correctly, some are missing body texts and some just hang.

  • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    Unsure about the pop3 recommendation (never saves on server you just download it and it’s gone from there but I probably missed something)

    Covered:

    What you want is POP3, BUT you’ll need ot make sure there’s a setting to leave email on the server.

    I am speaking as someone who did helpdesk in the 1990s. :)