US Patent 8069215 Configurable downloading of content pointed to in electronic messages

Systems and methods for downloading content referenced by a pointer or link in an electronic message. The downloaded content is stored locally in a cache for viewing offline or over low bandwidth connections. In some embodiments, users can optionally specify preferences for downloading or preloading content. These options include limiting the depth of layers of content to cache, limiting the number of links to cache, limiting the amount of time to spend downloading content, limiting the load on the CPU, limiting the amount of data to download, or restricting downloads to particular content providers or content.