Working Offline

QuickMail keeps a copy of your recent mail on this computer, and when the connection drops you keep reading it. The status bar’s connection label reads Offline; screen readers hear “Offline. Showing cached messages.” once, and “Back online.” when the connection returns. QuickMail waits a few seconds before saying Offline, so a momentary blip never interrupts you.

What works offline

• Reading any message you have opened before, or that QuickMail fetched ahead of time (it keeps the newest messages of each folder you open, and the ones around any message you read). To keep more, see Reading messages without a connection.
• The message list of every folder you have opened, with its unread state and flags.
• Searching and filtering what is on this computer, the calendar, and the address book.
• Composing. Saving a draft keeps it on this computer, and Send queues the message; both go to your account the moment the connection returns. See Working Offline: Drafts and the Outbox.

When you open a folder offline the status bar reads “Offline — showing 12 cached messages.” or “Offline — no cached messages in Projects.” It never sits on “Loading…”.

What needs a connection

• A message that was never downloaded: “This message is not available offline.” Reply and Forward on it say the same and open nothing.
• Attachments: “Attachments are not available offline.”
• New mail, folder changes, and everything else a server has to do. Marking read, flagging, moving and deleting are not queued: offline they fail with a message, and the next sync after the connection returns puts the message back the way the server has it. Only composing waits for you.

Reading messages without a connection

By default QuickMail keeps the full text of a message only once you have opened it, or when it fetched a few ahead of time. To have more ready before the connection drops, choose a window under Settings → General → Sync → Download messages for offline reading: Off (the default); the last 7, 30 or 90 days; the last 6 months or year; or All mail.

With a window set, the sync at launch and each background check (Check for new mail every) finish by downloading the text of each Inbox message in that window that QuickMail does not have yet, newest first, a few hundred at a time; new mail arriving in the Inbox gets its text straight away. When a pass completes you hear “Downloaded 120 messages for offline reading.” once. A few things to know:

• Inbox only, unless you also check Include other folders, not just the Inbox. Then Sent, Archive and your other folders are downloaded too — everything except Trash, Junk and Drafts — Inbox first. Search finds words in the text of those messages only once they are downloaded, so this is what makes searching your sent and archived mail work without opening each message. It can download a great deal more, so it is off by default. Without it, other folders keep working the way they always have: a message is kept once you open it.
• Never wider than the Sync range above it, since QuickMail cannot keep what it has not synced.
• Attachments are not included. Opening one still needs a connection.
• POP3 accounts already keep every message whole, so the setting does not apply to them.
• The text lives in mail.db in QuickMail’s data folder, which grows accordingly — roughly tens of megabytes for a month of a busy Inbox, so a year or all mail can run to hundreds of megabytes or more.
• The status bar says how it is going: “Messages: 1,240 of 2,000 downloaded”, and “Messages: downloading 120 of 500” while a batch is coming down. Press Ctrl+9 to reach the status bar (when no tabs are open; with tabs, Ctrl+9 goes to the last tab) and Right to move along it. Nothing is said aloud as it changes; it is there to be read when you want it.
• A large window fills in gradually. Each pass downloads up to 500 messages per Inbox, newest first, so a big Inbox set to a year or all mail takes many background checks to finish.

Getting back online

Nothing to press. When Windows reports the network again QuickMail reconnects every account by itself; if the network is up but the server does not answer (a hotel or airport sign-in page, an outage at the provider), it keeps trying on its own, first every half minute and then every five. F5 forces an attempt at any time. Once something answers, the folder you are looking at refreshes and anything waiting in the Outbox goes out.