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I've just got my new N900. I'm scared to ask this question in case the answer is as I suspect, but anyway...

How do I make the email client download all my email so I can read it offline?

With my N810, Nokia had apparently decided that no-one should ever be allowed to read email on a train or plane and you had to be connected to wifi to use it. This led me to the utterly absurd lengths of porting the dovecot email server to Maemo, running that on the device, and then writing a giant pile of perl scripts to synchronise the email on my server with the device. It worked, just about, but I was really looking forward to getting a N900 where, I assumed, Nokia would have woken up to the absurdity of assuming people were permanently online and have written a proper email application with basic features implemented. So please, someone tell me I was right? Please?

i have a question that is somewhat related to this. i have a few folders in my mail account that contain lists of accounts that I don't really care about - gamespy or EA for example account names and passwords listed - mostly junk passwords. not my secure ones of course.

i would like these folders to not be cached on my n900 locally ever and would like to password protect them even when online. is this possible?

at the moment my n900 seems to cache most of the messages that i open while online and i am able to access them while offline. not all but most of my inbox is available offline. i'm guessing the emails that i viewed on the phone are the cached ones (not entirely sure about that)

Unfortnately since N900 has cellular radio, Nokia is even moreconinced tha before that it's always online...

Claws on N810 has synchronize folder feature. I haven't tried it on N900 though.

The N900 caches the last email read...it might be possible to set it to cache all new incoming emails. Perhaps someone should file an enhancement request in bugzilla.

Hi,

offlineimap is your friend. Works like a charm.

Regards, davall

Could someone expand upon this? Is offlineimap a setting in Modest or an extra program you have to install?

It's an extra program, written in Python.

here: http://software.complete.org/software/wiki/offlineimap

I have no experience on well it works but there you have it.

Modest is based on Tinymail, and Tinymail is based on Camel. Camel's IMAP support has this feature built-in, but it's switched off in Tinymail.

So I tried patching Modest and Tinymail to switch it on. The result is that it seems to work. However, whenever I try to build the Tinymail libraries from source, the resulting packages cause frequent crashes in Modest. This is with or without my patches, so I don't think it's due to the changes I made.

I tried to get in touch with the developers on the mailing list, but didn't get any reply.

So for what it's worth, here are my patches. Maybe someone else can get the SDK to actually work.

There's still plenty wrong with this. Once an account is selected for synchronisation, it will only download mail once it detects that there are new messages. That usually means you need to go into the folder and look at the message list, then wait for it to finish downloading. And it won't download messages it already knows about. I might, but probably won't, have time to come up with a solution.

Also, it seems that when you're in offline mode and you start modest, it forgets about folders other than the standard ones. That doesn't bother me much, my usual situation is I want to keep reading my news feeds (which arrive in their own folders) even when the train goes underground. But it's not the way it should work.

Anyway:

http://mat.exon.name/tinymail.diff
http://mat.exon.name/modest.diff

Just to clarify the discussion of OfflineIMAP above, it won't work with Modest as an email client, you need to use Mutt in an xterm or some other mail program that supports Maildir as a local cache.

That's a deal-breaker for me personally, I can't live without a finger-friendly UI. So at the moment I'm playing an absurd game where when I want to cache email, I install my version of libtinymail-camel, then when I'm done I install the official libtinymail-camel to read them. It's good enough for the moment.

I submitted this bug to tinymail:
http://tinymail.org/trac/tinymail/ticket/91

Or an IMAP server that can serve email from local Maildir folders (such as dovecot) and your favourite IMAP client talking to that. Many people use that setup on laptops, but I haven't tried it on the N900.