Dec 16: Offline support now in public beta
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Chief Product Officer
This is the sixteenth post in the Fastmail Advent 2024 series. The previous post was Dec 15: Platform Team working agreement. The next post is Dec 17: Building offline: general architecture.
On an aeroplane, or down a tunnel. Roaming in a foreign land, or just out for a walk in the country. There are still times when we aren’t connected to the internet. As a strong supporter of open standards, you’ve always been able to use Fastmail with any email app you like, many of which work offline. However, many of our customers prefer the Fastmail app (we certainly do!), and offline support there has been our most popular request for some time. As Bron foreshadowed last year, we’ve been working hard on this big project for some time, and and we’re very pleased to announce it’s now ready for public beta testing.
What’s a beta?
Fastmail runs a beta version of our app to allow our users that like to live on the cutting edge to get early access to new features before they’re finished, and send us feedback while we’re still working on them. Things may be broken occasionally, but generally it’s pretty stable.
How do I get the beta?
If you are using our iOS or Android apps:
- Check for updates in the app store — make sure you have the latest version.
- Go to Settings → Device settings → Show Advanced Settings, and change the “server backend” to “Beta”.
If you are using Fastmail on the web, just log in at betaapp.fastmail.com.
In either case, once on beta you will find a new settings screen — Settings → Offline — where you can toggle on offline support. You must have ticked “Keep me logged in” when you logged in to enable offline support.
What can I do offline?
Almost everything! You can read mail, reply, view and edit your contacts/calendar, change settings, etc.…
Probably easier is to describe what won’t work offline:
- Mail search will not look inside attachments, and will give slightly different results to when online. If you don’t choose to make every message available offline, it won’t be able to match against content it hasn’t downloaded!
- Snoozed messages will not move back to the inbox while offline.
- Calendar reminders will not show a notification.
- You can’t delete attachments.
- You can’t attach files to a message you are composing.
- You can’t add or change users or domains, change your plan or update your billing details, or change your security settings.
How do I send feedback?
Found a bug? Got an idea? Something you like, or don’t like? Let us know! Our support team will pass all feedback on to the product team. We promise we read and carefully consider it all.
What’s the tech behind your offline support?
Interested in the technical details? Over the next few days I’m going to dive into how we built offline support into our app, starting with the general architecture.