I am in the process of trying to replace the aging Eudora 7.1 email client. I am testing emClient, but the searches are agonizingly slow when compared to Eudora’s indexed search. In addition, emClient does not seem to be finding all messages. For example, Eudora can search through 137 mailboxes in a fraction of a second, and find 370 matches. emClient searches through the same (imported) mailboxes, but it takes several minutes, and only finds 14 matches. Something isn’t right there.
Also, are there any plans to add indexed search capability to emClient?
eMClient actually has indexed search. It searches only for right-side word extension by default. For example searching for “mile” will also return messages containing “miles”. On the other hand “smile” will be omitted, because it is left-side extension.
This can be solved adding a star character before word. Example: “*mile”. Also make sure your active search option is “Subject, sender, recipients and body.”
Let us know if it solves your problem with amount of matches.
The speed is known issue right now. We were improving search capabilities and now is a time for some optimization.
No, unfortunately adding a “*” in front of (or after) the search term does not change the search results. I verified that the active search option is “Subject, sender, recipients and body.”
the new version of eMClient (3.0) is about to be released in couple of days. The search was significantly improved. Let us know if installing new version fixed your issue.
Unfortunately, the new version doesn’t find any more messages than the old version. (Although I believe it fails to find them more quickly.) I have switched to Outlook with the Xobni plugin. (I never thought I would use Outlook.) Thanks for the help, but I just don’t think emClient is ready for prime time…
Hello Craig,
I am sorry to hear this. What would help us is if you could provide an email message that you believe should be included in results and the search query for which it fails to be found. We could look into why the search doesn’t meet your expectations.
Also, I am sure you have selected the correct search options - “subject, sender, recipients AND body”.
Hi, I believe the problem may be with numbers, too.
I have ABCD1234 in one email body, and the search finds ABCD, but not 1234.
It also won’t find *1234.
This is a very important feature and I find myself going to Outlook Express to search through old emails (EMClient won’t find text in imported messages).
Hi, I have checked the merged topic and * in front of 123 seems to work now, it did not work 2 years ago though. I think you can consider this fixed for now.
Searches should find all matches by default, not only matching the beginning of words. There is no indication, even in the advanced search box, that searches won’t match the end of words unless an asterisk is added, and there is no help button, tooltip or anything. When people evaluate email programs, search is one of the most important things that is tested, and if they see that the results are incomplete they move straight to the next program.
I don’t think there would be any users getting annoyed with too many search results, and if so you could provide a checkbox or something, or a configuration option, to match only the start of words. The main thing is to make it complete by default. Does that sound reasonable?
This issue was annoying me for months before I found this post mentioning the asterisk!
This topic goes back over 3 years and search is still slow as heck. Look at Thunderbird, which my colleague has been using for years, and search is ALWAYS instantaneous. You should have also figured out how to do this by now.
There are a lot of great features in emClient but some that are very lacking and search speed is one of them. Also lacking, obviously, are the search results as indicated in the other comments above.
I haven’t much to contribute to this, but want to comment here because I came from the same place as the original poster 3 years ago. Because I do a lot of research and work for a company halfway across the world, I live on email for all practical purposes. It’s my database, my contact list, my private Wiki and so on. I also used the old Eudora until around six months ago because it was - and I will argue this with anyone - the best email client ever developed - ever! The search, the design, the ease of use, the sheer logic of it and the elegance. It remains unsurpassed. But I looked at every client out there, and on a tally sheet of pros and cons, eM Client probably edges out most everything else by a few points. Yes, there remain problems, some of them massive (it simply can’t handle Apple Mail). And the responses from the technical side here can be frustrating (we keep getting told to tell Apple to make a better product, while other mail clients work with Apple Mail just fine). But they’re very serious about doing a good job, and I believe that with constructive input, along with getting more people to use the client so that they can continue to fund r&d, it’ll eventually be among the best. I have to respect the attention that they give to the product, and their efforts on its behalf.
I second what Martin (above) says about search being fundamental to the definition of a workable mail client. I chose eM Client because, while it still has problems, search was just a bit better than most. Let’s hope it improves further.
I have been corresponding recently with Juraj on this issue. See support issue #12271 for details. I appreciate very much the responsiveness of support and everyone’s willingness to investigate, but I think it boils down to the fact that the current search index implementation isn’t very good.
I understand that it takes the same amount of time to search the entire email store as it does to search an individual folder, but when I do a search on a folder containing only 17 emails it is frustrating when it takes over 6 seconds, and that is when the database should be fully cached. Search times of over 40 seconds aren’t uncommon, and my database is only 4.5GB.
Have you guys considered implementing the search index with Lucene? There is a .NET implementation here: http://lucenenet.apache.org/
In my exerience Lucene is extremely fast, offers a wide range of search options, and has a relatively simple API. Most searches should complete in a fraction of a second even with huge datasets, and without the need for a solid state drive.
I really hope your team makes this issue a priority as it is something that significantly impacts my productivity every day. eM Client is by far the best Windows email client around, and believe me I evaluated heaps of them. You all do a fantastic job and I hope your efforts remain profitable as I don’t want to even think about what I’d have to go back to if eM Client didn’t exist. It’s just this one issue that drives me nuts!
Jan,
My database is about 4.7 GB. I have defrag set to automatic. Whenever I check, and I just ran an analysis again, it shows 0% fragmentation. So that’s not the issue.
How the heck do you get such fast response when so many others do not?
Are there any special settings we should check?
Thanks,
Ed
Part of the difference (eM Client tech should correct me if this is not the case) may be that a lot of us are coming from other clients, and have a huge amount of imported mail. I would imagine that eC takes longer to search formats that are non-native to it. The test was probably done with clients that have few or no imported mailboxes. Just a guess.