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:
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All mails for the Mailbox size
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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:
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Thunderbird: i can go Airplane mode, pick any emails and ALL contents are shown instantly. e.g. texts, attachments
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Fairmail: Airplane mode on, pick any emails and some emails are shown correctly, some are missing body texts and some just hang.
I don’t think TB for Android can survive this. TB for PC works. It’s able to deal with all my email dating back to 2006.
I don’t know about Tbird on Android, but I can tell you: For a good while now, almost everything uses IMAP for email, which is generally better these days because it leaves everything on the server, and that’s what most people want.
What you want is POP3, BUT you’ll need ot make sure there’s a setting to leave email on the server.
IMAP is designed to use email left on the server. POP3 is used to download (and remove) email from the server. But you want to also leave it on the server. But you want to use POP3 because it’s designed to download all your email.
Never had your specific use case, but heard good things about K9 Mail?
They have a bulk export function, I did that. If you code you could probably do something with it to import somewhere else.
