MailDroid caches the headers of an email as it arrives, but leaves it up to the user on what to do about the body of the email. The "Pre-Loading and Indexing Settings" preferences allows you to define per account caching and search support. Please read this carefully so that you can make the correct decision on what you would like to do per account.
MailDroid stores this information on your SD Card and an SD card is required for this functionality. Although the size of MailDroid may go up because of this storage, you can feel comfortable knowing that all this info is on your SD card. Please be aware that Android does not support folder security on anything that is stored on your SD card.
Accounts Dropdown
- This will show all your IMAP/POP3 accounts and you can select a different setting per account.
- The default setting for IMAP/POP3 is to 'Save and Index opened mail text' which can be read about below.
- Exchange is not supported yet and you will not see any Exchange accounts in this dropdown.
Don't save mail text
- Make sure that the body is never cached and will force a connection to your server to get the body of each email.
- Slow down opening an email as MailDroid will need to read email from server each time.
- Require that you have a network connection to read your email and no email can be read when you are offline.
- Save on bandwidth and data transfer as the body is not pulled until you decide you want to read the mail.
- Save on disk space as the body is never stored.
Save and Index opened mail text
- Make sure that the body is not downloaded automatically.
- Cache and index the body of the email when your open it.
- Slow down opening an email for the first time only as MailDroid will need to get it from the mail server.
- When you are offline, you can read only emails that you have opened earlier.
- Save on bandwidth and data transfer as the body is not pulled until you decide you want to read the mail.
Pre-Load and Index all listed messages
- Make sure that the body is downloaded in background.
- Cache and index the body of the email when your are alerted.
- Speed up opening emails as no connection is needed to the server.
- When you are offline, you can read all your emails.
- Will cost the most on bandwidth and data transfer as the body is pulled down for all listed .
The action button allows you to index and get the body for all emails that you have listed (all email headers on your device for that specific account in the dropdown).
Pre-Load and Index Button
- Clicking this button will do a one time index/pre-load and get the body for all email headers that exist on your device in the specified account.
- You can click this for an account that is set to not save mail text to manually index and get the body.
- You have control of when you want to index (on Wi-Fi, with power cable plugged, etc.).
Possible scenario:
- Account 1: I never want to save the body of this email and don't want to see it in search results so I set it to 'Don't save mail text'.
- Account 2: I get a lot of spam mail, but when I click on an email I want it to be saved so I can read it offline. I set this to 'Save and Index opened mail text'.
- Account 3: This one is important for me to have constant access to, so I want to set it to 'Pre-Load and Index all listed messages'.
- Account 4: I don't need access all the time, but I'd like to control the loading and indexing in one shot. I set it to 'Don't save mail text' and click the button to index and pre-load on demand.
Do not pre-load messages older than XX days
This gives you the option not to index messages older than a number of days even when clicked on.
E.g. if set to 2 days and you click some message that was sent to you 3 days ago, it will not be indexed.
To summarize, these settings allow complete control on what MailDroid will do for indexing and caching per email account that is set up.
In the future, more options may be added to this feature.