[ILUG] Bandwidth friendly IMAP client.

[Gareth Eason]

       Hi,

    Thunderbird will quite happily download and store messages locally, 
if you select to make the folders available offline. It does NOT do this 
by default.

    Just go to 'Tools' | 'Account Settings...' and the 'Offline & Disk 
Space' section will allow you to set which folders you wish to make 
available 'locally' (which means a locally cached copy is synchronised 
when the server is available.) I think this is the behaviour you're 
looking for.

    Alternatively, you can right click on a folder and select 
'Properties...' and the second tab in the displayed dialog is 'offline.' 
You can select to download all the messages in the folder to local cache 
and/or select to always make the contents of the folder offline.

    Two issues to be aware of are:
       - I've not found a way to stop displaying a warning that the 
server is not contactable for every message I click when offline. This 
is irritating but will surely be fixed by v1.0.
    - Also, there are some issues about attachment viewing offline. Even 
though Thunderbird DOES definitely download and store the attachment in 
local cache, it seems to sometimes 'forget' that it's there and refuses 
to display it until the server can be contacted again. Similarly, I 
expect this will be fixed by v1.0.

    Neither of these issues have tempted me away from the excellence of 
Thunderbird as an e-mail client btw :-)

    Hope this helps.
    Best regards,
    -->Gar


Niall O Broin wrote:

> On 6 Sep 2004, at 18:22, Lisa Muir wrote:
>
>> Can anyone recommend a bandwidth friendly IMAP client for linux?
>>
>> It seems that KMail and Thunderbird don't cache downloaded messages,
>> so after I view the 2Mb solicited marketing message, poof, its gone
>> once I stop viewing it, and I have to download it all over again
>> everytime I want to refer to it.
>
>
> I believe that the latest KMail, as delivered with KDE 3.3, does 
> support disconnected IMAP folders. I haven't used it yet, so I can't 
> comment on how well it works.
>
>
>
> Niall
>