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I'm trying to help a friend.
They have 200k+ emails in their gmail account. They will be returning to a third-world country soon, where internet access is unreliable, expensive, and slow. Up to this point, they've been using POP, but that means when they want to switch from desktop to laptop (for traveling), they need to manually copy the outlook folder from one computer to another.
It is my understanding that imap can be used for accessing email from multiple devices. It is also my understanding that outlook can be set to download the full message so that the email is available offline. I thought that once a message had downloaded, it would be a very quick check with the server to see if anything changed. Yet, when I hit send/receive, it seems to say it's re-downloading every message. And it takes a REALLY long time. If it's taking a really long time with my relatively speedy USA connection, it will likely be unworkable overseas.
So, how can they have offline access to a gmail account available on multiple devices? Ideally, is there a way to set imap to only send/download recent changes?
Switching to thunderbird or some other program is an option if that would help.
David Oneill
Posted 2016-12-14T06:49:37.750
Reputation: 2 381
For a start not having 200k+ emails (probably in a single folder?) would tremendously help. Consider checking out Thunderbird KB IMAP Synchronization and How to fix slow Outlook IMAP folder synchronization issues this. IMAP actually does (on most clients) only manage "recent" changes but with 200k+ elements it takes a lot of time to see what changed.
– Seth – 2016-12-14T08:16:43.407