Troubleshooting

Google caps how much mail data a single Gmail or Google Workspace account can move per day. The caps apply to the account, not to the app — Apple Mail, your phone and MailVault all draw from the same daily budget.

Go over a limit and Google temporarily suspends the account: usually about 1 hour, but it can last up to 24 hours. The limits are the same on every Google Workspace edition, and Google can change them without notice — see Google's bandwidth limits documentation for the current numbers.

What this means for a first backup. A mailbox larger than about 2.5 GB cannot be downloaded in one day over IMAP — no client can do it, that is a server-side cap. Expect a large archive to take several days.

What MailVault does. It recognises the limit response, stops the run cleanly instead of retrying into a longer lockout, and tells you the daily limit was reached. Start the backup again once the suspension clears and it continues where it stopped — messages already saved locally are skipped, so nothing is downloaded twice. Everything already on disk stays readable and searchable while you wait.

Because there is no spelling dictionary on the machine. macOS and Windows ship one with the system; on Linux the dictionary comes from your distribution, and a minimal desktop install often has none. MailVault checks spelling through WebKitGTK, which looks words up through enchant and hunspell — so it can only underline once a hunspell dictionary is installed.

The button in the message toolbar tells you which case you are in. With a dictionary present it toggles the underlines on and off, and MailVault remembers the setting. With none, it opens these same instructions instead of pretending to be a switch.

Install a dictionary for your language:

Swap the language code for your own — hunspell-de-de, hunspell-fr, and so on. You can install several; MailVault checks against the one that matches your system language, and against all of them if none matches. Restart MailVault afterwards — the checker is set up when the app starts.

The snap build is a special case. A strictly confined snap cannot see dictionaries installed on the host, so it carries its own copy. If the snap reports no dictionary, install the .deb package instead — it uses the dictionaries already on your system.

Within ten minutes. MailVault keeps a copy of your folder list on disk so the sidebar fills in the moment you open an account, and it re-reads the list from the server at most once every ten minutes. Create, rename or delete a folder in webmail or another mail client, and MailVault picks the change up the next time it opens that account or you click a folder in the sidebar — once those ten minutes have passed.

Restarting does not hurry it along. The cached list is on disk, not in memory, so it survives a quit and relaunch. Waiting out the ten minutes and then clicking any folder is the fastest way to see a change you just made.

The Refresh button is about messages, not folders. It reloads the mail in the folder you are reading. The folder list runs on its own ten-minute check, which is why a brand new folder can stay hidden for a few minutes after a refresh.

Subfolders need no setup. MailVault builds the tree from the paths the server reports, so a new subfolder turns up nested under its parent with the right name and position. Accounts you are not currently reading are refreshed in the background on the same schedule, a couple at a time, so switching to one rarely shows you a stale list.

What raises the banner. When a connection to a mail server fails in a way that points at the network, MailVault checks the internet itself, and only when nothing answers does it show No internet connection. While the banner is up, your mail is still there: MailVault shows what is already saved on this computer, pauses background syncing and clears the banner on its own once the check succeeds. Check again runs the check at once.

It now also checks your own mail servers. The check used to ask three public DNS servers on the DNS port only. Many company networks, VPNs and internet providers block that port, so on those networks the banner appeared while everything else worked. It now also tries those servers on port 443, the port secure websites use, and your own mail servers as well: any one of them answering means you are online. Mail servers on this computer or your local network, such as Proton Mail Bridge, are left out, since they answer even when the internet is down. Every connection the check makes is listed in Settings → Privacy & security → Network Activity.

A blocked port looks different. If the internet works but a firewall or VPN blocks the port one mail server uses, MailVault does not say the internet is gone. It names the server and the port that did not answer, for example "No answer from imap.example.com, port 993", and says a firewall or VPN may be blocking it. Adding an account that cannot connect says the same. Give that server name and port to your IT team so they can allow it, or try another network.

Nothing you ask for is held back. Whatever the banner says, opening a message or deleting one still goes ahead, because a wrong verdict must never lock you out of your own mail.