There is the persistent assumption that Android === cellphone, despite the existence of wifi-only models since at least 2011 when Honeycomb came out… isn’t it time to get with the more modern trend and finally start supporting these devices?
There is always the assumption that all androids always have fast, free and unlimited (not metered) connectivity. This can only ever be true for cellphones on an unlimited data plan, and even then only in urban areas with good coverage. For wifi-only devices, or for folks who live outside urban areas, work in basement locations, travel through tunnels, etc there will be many (even most) times when there just is not any available internet service regardless of price. So it becomes necessary to deal with being offline much of the time, and androids in general just don’t do this very well.
Even worse, there is the assumption that local storage is somewhere between limited and nonexistent, despite the fact that even my 12 year old android running FroYo has a slot to add a rather large SD card - and shouldn’t more modern hardware be capable of so much more than that old one?
What I really want is for apps to support the reality I live in rather than force me to pretend I have some other situation that just does not exist here. I need to substitute cheap and abundant local storage for expensive and often unavailable bandwidth, while most of the android world is hell bent on enforcing exactly the opposite situation.
Something missing not just from the FOSS ecosystem, but from Android in general whether free or proprietary - a FULL email client. Meaning one that is equivalent in functionality to a complete desktop client. That means full support for local folders. POP should be fully supported, not just as an incomplete afterthought that “people really shouldn’t use such an old protocol anyway now that we have IMAP so it doesn’t matter that POP is incomplete”. And local backups and restores of message storage is a must.
The email clients I can find all insist on the IMAP model where you NEVER have access to all your messages locally, only a very limited subset at any given time, and that set is constantly being erased to make room for a different subset. Yeah, they have reluctantly added some limited support for POP protocol, but it is nowhere near as robust as a typical desktop client has for POP. Their plan for dealing with message database corruption is always the same… delete all your data and re-download all your messages, with no other way to get them onto a device, not even through ADB and USB cables. This doesn’t work when you have 45 years worth of data to handle, and near zero bandwidth to re-download all that data over. There is still the assumption that “old” data needs to be cleared out to make space for new stuff and you still can’t have all your data onboard at the same time.
These same apps that are pushing the IMAP model still seem to believe that IMAP is clearly superior because POP servers cannot leave the messages on the server even though many desktop users have been doing exactly that for at least the past 25 years. On the one hand you MUST leave it all on the server if you want to have access to it in the future after one of those inevitable data corruption incidents that seem more common on androids in general. On the other hand with no way to make local backups the situation is much worse for IMAP where that type of corruption will then get synced back to the server, thus corrupting the only possible backup, so you really can’t plan to keep it on the server reliably with IMAP either. At least with POP the corruption won’t reverse sync bad data back to the server to overwrite good data which then (for IMAP) would get synced to other devices, corrupting their message stores as well, so using POP and keeping messages on the server is much safer in terms of avoiding data loss.
This is not so good privacy wise, and very different from the desktop model where the user gets to choose whether to leave it there or not, plus the message store can easily be included in many types of backup and restored locally as needed… but it’s just not possible in the android ecosystem.
Yes I know about both FairEmail and K9. These two seem to be “best of breed” for android email clients. Plus there are many other apps that are forks of these. But none of them support local folders, nor can the message database be properly exported or imported for any of them. So no, none of them really meet the needs of a wifi-only android user.