First — what is index synchronization anyway?
Runbox 7 can keep a searchable index of your mailbox right in your browser. It’s what lets you scroll through years of email instantly, search your entire archive in the blink of an eye, and even open pre-loaded messages immediately even if you’re offline — things a traditional webmail interface simply can’t do.
The index is only a local copy of the server index that makes things extra fast in your browser. Your mail itself always lives safely on our servers — if index sync is switched off or stopped, every message is still in your account; you just lose the fast full-archive search and column sorting until it’s switched back on.
The index sync is getting some improvements so that it will work better and faster. As it works now, on first sign-in (or after clearing your local cache), Runbox 7 has to download and build the entire index before it’s fully useful. For accounts with a lot of mail, that’s meant a wait, and until it finished, your newest messages were slow to appear, leaving the message list lagging behind what was actually in your mailbox.
What we’re changing
Recent messages, right away. When you initially enable index sync, the newest batch of your mail arrives and becomes usable almost immediately. You don’t have to wait for the full index download to finish.
A message list you can trust sooner. The list switches to the fast local index as soon as the first batch is ready, and you can then immediately perform searches or switch folders.
Older mail. The first chunk of history comes down automatically. If you have a lot of older mail, Runbox 7 will ask before downloading large amounts of older mail.
Sync status. Sync status now lives in the search field, with a live count of how many messages are searchable — no more mystery sync counters near the bottom of the screen.
Built to recover. If a sync is interrupted — connection drop, closing the tab mid-download — it now retries safely, picks up where it left off, and won’t leave your index in a half-built state.
Works from a clean slate. Brand-new accounts without an existing server index now sync smoothly from scratch, too — even if you import a lot of email from other services.
Where it stands
This work is currently in review on GitHub, and we’ll share more as it makes its way toward production. As always with Runbox, development is in the open — you can follow along at https://github.com/runbox/runbox7.
Thanks for your patience and for all the feedback on index synchronization in Runbox 7. Stay tuned for updates.
— The Runbox Team