em Client’s backup feature is very limited. The maximum NUMBER of backups is 5. How far out that stretches depends on the granularity of the backup (from 1 day to 6 months). 5 backups with each at a 6-month interval gets me to 5 years but with huge gaps of e-mail volume between each 6-month interval. The granularity becomes excessively large to span a reasonable time.
Saving multiple backups is not the same as archiving messages based on their age. The backup will have all messages regarding of their age. Archiving moves out old messages to merge into an archive database, or it deletes old messages that you don’t want to keep past an age threshold. Sorry, but the backups are not really an archiving function.
Isn’t the point of backup programs that incorporate VSC (Volume Shadow Copy) to get at content of files that are locked or inuse? When I had Outlook running 24x7, my backup software using VSC to create a shadow copy could include the .pst and .ost files in my image backups. Why would a VSC-capable backup program not be able to read a shadow copy of %appdata% folder?
Isn’t the point of using computers is to get them to automate tasks that users would otherwise need to do manually? I like the feature of exporting my e-mails outside the e-mail client but I’m not really going to do that on a regular schedule. Only when there is a rare need would I do that. Plus, it exports the entire data set which either you would overwrite the previously exported one or save in a different location to keep multiple versions. Archiving would update just one external file or database. In addition, I wasn’t just looking to save old e-mails. In some folders, I want to *delete* old e-mails, like in the Junk and Deleted folders, after an age the reflected the use of a folder. I don’t want to be doing all this archiving and synchronization myself. No one asking for an archiving feature or enhancements is asking to do it manually.
Exporting the app’s settings is irrelevant to how it archives. I like the ability to export the app’s settings for a quicker reconfiguration later, like if having to install the app again. But that’s nothing to do with the missing archive features.
I have a Gmail account. I see no archiving function in that service. You have to connect to their webmail client and click the Archive button in that webclient. According a Google blog:
Archiving just means moving mail out of your inbox and storing it for safekeeping. Your messages will be waiting for you when you click All Mail or search for them.
Well, that is not archiving. That is just hiding or moving. You can do that without using their Archive button. I already have a folder named Archive, but it could be named Keep, Hold, or some other name. It is to where I move messages out of the Inbox into that holding folder or subfolders under it to organize the messages moved out of Inbox. That lets me keep my Inbox clean rather than polluted with old messages. I’ve seen some users that have THOUSANDS of old e-mails in their Inbox rather than move out just the important ones into other holding folders. Having a folder where you keep messages out of the Inbox is not archiving. In fact, with a decent auto-archive function, like in Outlook, I could set different expirations on those holding folders that would either archive old messages (move them into a different message store) or delete them, or specify a global archive but for the permanent holding folders I could disable archiving on them (i.e., messages moved into them will NEVER get archived as they remain permanent).
Is em Client targeting its competition at the less then 1% marketshare of e-mail clients of which Thunderbird would then be its largest competitor? Or is it competing against the major e-mail client on desktops, which would be Outlook? It can’t be competing against the e-mail apps on smartphones since those are so highly crippled that they are incomparable against Outlook, Thunderbird, and em Client, plus em Client doesn’t run on Android or iOS, anyway. Seems the feature set in em Client is targeting Outlook as its competition, but it is falling far shorter than I expected.
Outlook is more oriented for business use. Although I didn’t use Outlook for business use (despite that I paid for it), I like its many business-like features for my personal use of an e-mail client. em Client seems to be a pale wannabe of Outlook and more of a competitor to Thunderbird (which is free with no payware version). I’ve trialed Thunderbird many times. The last was about 2 years ago where I managed to tolerate a full 6-month trial. I dumped it to go back to Outlook. I went from free to paid. Being free is nice but not critical to my decision for an e-mail client. I was willing to pay to go back to Outlook. I hate to sound like a Microsoft fanboy. I’m deciding on which e-mail client (with contacts and calendar sync) to move to in my new Windows 10 build (the included Mail, Calendar, and People apps SUCK). Of my posts here after a new trial of em Client, you can see several features are missing that I consider either critical or very important. em Client seems better than Thunderbird (from what I recall of Thunderbird) but still far short of Outlook.
I see announcements in the forum of some new features that might show up in v8 of em Client, so I might continue trialing it to see how much it improves in the next major version, but I won’t wait many months for v8 to get released while sacrificing features I could have in Outlook.
