Why is the scan taking so long?

Recovering a large archive simply takes time, and Snapattic is deliberately conservative so it never disrupts your account.

What is happening

• It reads your attachments over a private IMAP connection and saves photos one at a time, in original quality, organized by year.
• Your email provider limits how much can be downloaded each day. When that limit is reached, the scan pauses until the next day. See Daily limit.

Why it can take multiple days

An inbox with years of photos can be many gigabytes. Providers throttle daily IMAP downloads to protect your account, so a full recovery may span several days — each day resuming from the last saved checkpoint (if a day ended mid-message, that message is re-checked, but already-saved photos are skipped). See Resume.

What to do

• Leave it resumed each day until it finishes. Progress is saved; you never lose what is already recovered.
• The scan runs entirely on your computer. It does not upload anything, and it never touches your mail.

It seems stuck

If nothing has progressed for a long while, check your connection and click Resume. If a single download keeps failing after retries, resume later: it remains eligible instead of being silently called corrupt or skipped. See Network and Corrupt attachments.