I don’t know if this is relevant beyond v 7.2 which is what I’m using, (and I do intend on upgrading soon) but somehow the database got corrupted. I’ve been spending the last too many days and hours working on salvaging the messages that I could. And in the process learning much more about eM Client than I ever wanted to. Theoretically there was once some sort of app that was supposed to be able to help fix this issue, but it seems to no longer be available.
What I describe below might already be in a forum message somewhere, but I couldn’t find it.
In any case, what was happening was that if you clicked on a corrupted message eMC would crash and even worse you couldn’t restart it without deleting all the files and then copying a saved set of “good” files back into the directory. You also couldn’t delete any messages without causing a crash. So there was a lot of frustrating time spent figuring that out.
Using export also was a problem because it would only export some messages before hitting a bad message and then stopping.
Entirely by accident, I discovered that right clicking with all the messages selected in a folder gives the “Save as” menu option. This turned out to be a life saver. It would save the messages as .eml files, but when it would hit a bad one it just gave a warning and asked if you wanted to continue. You could and by doing this it would go through and save all the messages, and even for the bad ones it would at least save the title, so I had a record of what I was missing. If I’d known about this first I would have saved many many hours of frustration.
Of course I did a fresh install, and imported all the messages and that worked just fine.
I can’t say how long this problem existed, and I never would have known about it if I hadn’t clicked on an older message recently, causing a crash. Evidence for the problem was that eMC failed to make backup files for a long time, but that’s not something I check every day. It would be nice if the software could do some sort of self-check before opening. Although maybe that’s been added to the latest release.
Also I have to add that the eMC support was of no use to me whatsoever. I can’t even remember their response, but it wasn’t helpful.
I like this mail browser, but I can see that I’m going to have to remember to check it every single day to make sure there’s no issues.
I hope this long message might help someone else out.