We have been working hard last months in order to increase the speed of Modest. Summing up

• By default you will only see the last 250 emails on each folder. This dramatically speeds up the filtering and sorting of the emails. We can do this thanks to this great patch by my colleague Dape. Now we can do things like showing a "Show more messages" button, à la iphone.
• Several fixes in tinymail drastically reduced the amount of requests to the server that we needed to have a fully updated list of mail folders for one account. You will notice that loading the folders of a particular account is now much faster.
• Accounts window is now shown almost instantly (you will also see a cool transition effect that shows the last updated time). The trick? Just use hildon_gtk_window_take_screenshot()

And last but not least, replying to pure HTML emails no longer generates a distorted message.

Want more? Just get the code and contribute!