Since today for both POP and IMAP it’s possible to, while you are retrieving summary items, start opening (downloading) uncached E-mails. On IMAP this is done (a few weeks ago) using an extra socket. With POP this is done (today) by throwing RETR commands in between the TOPs that are needed for the summary fetch on the same connection (most POP servers lock the access to one connection per user). It’s also possible and well tested to have Push E-mail events of 1000ths of new and expunged E-mails. It’s possible to see your headers (summary) view to get filled up while retrieving summary info. All this while Tinymail attempts to keep the bandwidth acceptable low for GPRS.
Jose Dapena Paz also recently added support for removing attachments from already cached E-mails. This is a feature that is interesting for devices that don’t have a lot of (flash) disk space. Again retrieving the uncached attachment should also work. Partial retrieval (initially retrieving without attachments) is working, but suboptimal. We’ll be working on improving features like this soon. POP is of course much more difficult as there’s no way to know where a MIME part starts nor to select which of the lines you want to retrieve.
Huge amounts of small and big things are being fixed. Required features being implemented. A lot of work is being done.