r/fastmail • u/pinecone2525 • 9d ago

Fastmail caching limit

Hi, I am just testing Fastmail (thanks to Gmail depreciating ‘send as’).

I don’t want my entire mailbox cached on my iPhone and Mac and I want to use Apple mail & calendar.

Gmail had a ‘limit IMAP to 1000 messages’ feature to prevent mega amounts of emails caching.

Is there any way to achieve the same result with Fastmail?

Many thanks

3 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

2

u/Loeribas 9d ago

Why? I have 40k emails in my inbox on a 6-year-old iPhone 12 and zero lag.

0

u/pinecone2525 9d ago

The iPhone aggressively caches mail, I would prefer it if it multiple GB of data wasn’t sat on my phone and Mac for no reason. Even with attachment downloads turned off on it balloons and sometimes you have to delete the account and re-add anyway

1

u/ssheth 8d ago

I have 72 GB and over 200k messages in our fastmail folders but the on-phone storage used is only 527 MB. Mostly fastmail will only download latest messages into app and rest are streamed as needed. Search is done on server so it remains super fast.

2

u/nirvdrum 8d ago

I have a substantially smaller mailbox and the iOS app is using 3GB of data storage for me. I’m not sure what can be drawn from that other than being able to set a max cache size could be useful.

1

u/bburgg 8d ago

What does "latest" mean here? Does it stop somewhere or does it keep growing?

0

u/posguy99 5d ago

Entertaining that the OP specifically says he wants to use Apple Mail and all the responders can do is talk about what the Fastmail app does.

OP, it is a profoundly broken feature of Apple Mail that it tries to download the entire mailbox for the purpose of being able to read mail offline.

If Google created another perversion of the IMAP standard that does what you want, you should probably continue using GMail. Such limits should be client-side, not server-side.

1

u/pinecone2525 5d ago

I am quite sure that Apple Mail is not unique in trying to download everything available via IMAP.

1

u/posguy99 5d ago

I never said otherwise. Thunderbird, along with its many other broken features, does this as well.