What Happens When Your Computer Sleeps
When your computer suspends, all network connections close and Premail's polling loops freeze. Emails that arrive while you're away don't get lost. They're waiting on your provider's servers, and Premail catches up the moment your computer wakes up.
How catch-up works
Before each polling cycle, Premail saves a timestamp of when it last checked. On wake, the first thing it does is read that timestamp and fetch everything that arrived since then, before resuming normal polling.
- iCloud: opens a new IMAP connection and retrieves any messages delivered after the saved timestamp. These go through your rules exactly as they would have in real time.
- Gmail: replays missed events using Google's History API. If you were away long enough that the history window expired, Premail falls back to a direct timestamp query and resets its cursor. Either way, nothing is skipped.
- Outlook: uses Microsoft Graph delta queries to fetch only messages that arrived since the last sync. Premail resumes from its saved delta link and catches up before resuming normal polling.
What you'll see
The account status briefly shows Reconnecting while the connection re-establishes. Within a few seconds it returns to Connected and the caught-up messages appear in the Activity log, already classified and actioned.
If Wi-Fi takes a moment to come back after wake, Premail retries automatically, starting at a few seconds and backing off to a maximum of five minutes. It runs the catch-up immediately once the connection succeeds.
Still have questions?
Contact Support (for Pro members)