[lug] imap on handheld

[nimbus nimbus]

i know a lot of you out there use iphones.  i don't have an iphone but i have an ipod touch 5th generation that i've been using for about three years now.  it was recently upgraded to the latest ios 9.2 i think so for all intensive purposes it's an iphone in terms of apps.

i've been traveling a lot lately and as i've come to use / depend on this gadget a lot, it's started to annoy me a lot.  i presume iphones with data plans (always connected to the inet) may not have this problem but since it's an itouch, the only time it's actually connected is when you are near and connected to a wireless network signal.  here goes

b/c my itouch isn't connected 24x7, what i've done is configured the mail app to use imap for a variety of my email accounts with the hope that what i download to my inbox and folders on the itouch will be with me when i'm NOT connected.  i often will send myself "reader view" articles of web pages that i want to read offline and am sort of collecting a library of "mail documents" this way as and offline library.

here's the rub though.  if i click on the message to download the message body to the itouch, my thought is that it is a permanent download and should / will always be there.   but it often never works this way.   at some arbitrary point in time, when i disconnect from the wireless network, sometimes those email bodies will be available to me but never permanently it seems.  b/c i will go to access  the mail message and it won't be there anymore when disconnected, forcing me to REdownload it again next time i'm connected!!! it's frustrating as hell.  

so when i download a mail message to the mail app on the device configured imap, shouldn't it just be mirroring a local copy?  why does it at some arbitrary point go missing and force me to redownload once i'm connected again?  am i missing a setting or something or not understanding how imap works.  i know on a pc, if i configure tbird or outlook or whatever i'm almost 1000% sure that once the mail message is downloaded (mirrored) it is there for good.  correct me if i'm wrong.

fwiw, a good portion of these "reader view" mail messages are probably lightweight html b/c sometimes they do have links in them as well as images.  i enabled a feature in the mail app to NOT download images thinking that was the issue.  but though this configuration setting does prevent the mails from displaying images, it hasn't fixed the problem of the constant arbitrary refresh.

PART 2

i see the same super annoying symptoms with the safari web browser on the itouch.   if i open a web page in a browser on a pc, i can leave that tab up for 2 centuries, put my pc to sleep, switch to other apps and then come back to the tab and the page will still be loaded.  

on my itouch, if i'm in safari with multiple tabs open and go to anyone that hasn't been active for even a short time, the damned app ALWAYS wants to refresh the page!!!!! not only is it annoying as hell on a slow connection and wastes tons of time.. but if i want to load a bunch of pages, disconnect from teh wireless and take them to read offline, i'm going to be out of luck again after some arbitrary even shorter period of time than with the email above.

basically it's the same exact problem, with a different app - browser vs mail.

PART 3

you can extend this to so many apps on the itouch that it's just plain annoying.  i can maybe see that my airbnb app was designed to refresh itself every time i switch away from it and return to it (though it pissed me off no end), but if i have a specific photo active in the stock apple photos app, switch off the app (mind you it's still running just not active like in all the examples above), the photo app will reset to the main photo app albums home page forcing me to drill back down to the folder, scroll through all my photos and pick the same one again!!!!


it's like ios doesn't think that some users (i think all other than just myself ;)) don't want to maintain state when they switch back and forth between active apps!  

am i missing something?  is there a setting?  do people want this behavior and i'm the oddball?  i just don't get it.

please tell me there's a way to put an end to the constant app refreshing it's driving me nuts.  fwiw, i believe i tried disabling background app refresh or some other setting and it didn't help at all and it wasn't even available on some of the apps i was having constant refreshes with...


thanks to anybody that can help shed some light

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