EM-Client is a desaster...

PS. I haven’t tried this on a different computer. I don’t have this option unfortunately.

Yeah, not everyone has access to another computer. Your profile folder is quite large, I am going to reproduce it to test something.

I assume you are using IMAP. Would you say most of your emails are texts, or are there a lot of attachments?

Indeed—when I start a new database, things are fast.

But then it starts downloading all my messages…which will amount to becoming slow very soon. Is there a way not to download all messages?

Both attachements (PDFs) and texts.

There was a question just recently asking if a limit could be set to which emails were downloaded. But that is not possible. Through the web interface for your account you could move messages to another folder, and disable that folder for IMAP. Then eM Client would not download them. Otherwise I really don’t know what the solution is for such big Inboxes. I recently mentioned to Jay on this forum that I found eM Client to be sluggish with bigger Inboxes, and performance also varies among different servers.

Give me a couple of days to look at a 8GB database, and I will get back to you.

I would also like to say something good: Even if the answers are not always immediately useful, this program is characterized by a very good support. You can reach professionals immediately. And you can at least articulate a problem. With Thunderbird went after an update the printing no more. Only Murx came out. That was clearly a bug. There were forums but no contact and it took more than 6 months to fix the problem. Here is a contact person who really tries hard. That’s a big plus for em-client. Thanks for that…

Okay—things seems slightly better now. I got rid of the 8gb database. And started eMClient now from scratch. It now downloads only headers. And it is fast enough for me now.

I believe that the problem was that I downloaded all emails for offline use, which is impossible for eMClient to operate efficiently.
I am sure some better heuristics in the design of eMClient would have solved this problem as well. But as of now I can still continue using eMClient.

My database is over 7 GB and it is quite fast.  I wonder if your slow down was because the initial sync was not complete (this is a slow process, even with lots of bandwidth, especially with attachments).  This could explain why only downloading headers speeds things up.

My database is 20 GB, the database of my wife 30 GB. We don’t really have issues with speed, only with uploading e-mails with attachments, but that’s because of our bad internet connection. (e-mails with attachments keep stuck in the ‘outbox’, although they might already have been sent 20 times to the receiver. Then I need to manually move my e-mail from the ‘outbox’ to the ‘sent’ items.)

It did make a big difference in speed (starting, browsing, searching e-mails) when I moved my database from my HDD to my SSD.

So I ran the test with the following test environment. I used less RAM because I was interested in it’s effect on the database, and otherwise tried to emulate a lower spec computer.

Windows 10, 4GB RAM, 2 core CPU, SSD
eM Client 7.1.30794, no other software running.
100Mbps LAN connection to IMAP server
IMAP account with 30955 emails in 2 folders. 675 of those emails each had a large pdf attachment ranging in size from 10-18MB.

With download messages for offline use enabled, including attachments, and conversations off, it took about 1 hour to fully sync with the server. During that time normal operations were not affected except new incoming emails did not appear until the sync was complete. I could send email during sync, and the mails were received by the recipient immediately. After restart, eM Client took 4 sec to load and emails load in less than 1 second. I ran this test a second time and tried to create another folder on the server and move messages to it from a local folder during the sync. The sync stalled, and I had to restart. In a further test with conversation on, the sync appeared to have stalled, so I closed eM Client, and on restart it resumed the sync without any problem.
Database size 9.7GB

With download messages for offline use not selected, and conversations off, the same process took 3 minutes to sync and normal operations were not affected during the sync. With conversations on it took 6 minutes. I think it stalled once during the process, but seemed to recover automatically. eM Client start was about the same, except with conversations on it took a little longer. Opening emails only fractionally longer in both cases than with offline data. I suppose if your connection to the server is slow, then that will affect opening emails.
Database size 58MB.

This test was just for initial setup and sync, and did not test ongoing use. I am backing Jay on the idea that maybe incomplete syncing may have affected normal use. On other tests with online servers using about 3000 messages, I did notice some servers (Google) seemed to be continuously syncing, or taking a long time to sync what should have only taken a short time. In some cases this did slow down eM Client, but not sufficiently that it was unusable.

Anyway, Gary, see how things move forward with your current settings.

It is also important to note you are using version 6, correct?

100 MBit / s LAN to the IMAP server? Who has his IMAP server in his own network? Most of the IMAP servers are on the WAN. And you rarely have 100 Mbps effectively. Realistic are 25 to 50 MBit / s (and that would be good). 30955 emails in 2 folders? Sweet :wink: Try 10,000 emails each in 50 folders. So in total about 500,000 mails and more, plus 10% attachments. And please try several IMAP accounts on different servers in the WAN at the same time.

I have 2 IMAP servers on my LAN. One is production, one is for testing. No point in hassling a Google server with a test.

If you have 500000 emails, I think you may have a compulsive hoarding disorder. :slight_smile:

So you can see that :wink: The German authorities call the documentation obligation and I call the laziness. 10 years of storage, ie 140 mails per day, 30 days a month, 12 months a year, 10 years. Sure you could now filter and outsource. But that also makes work. Decisive is not even the number of emails, but the number of folders. From the history, there is this classification. She has also proven herself.

I think you may find that keeping your correspondence from the last 10 years, does not mean that you have to keep it in your email client. Just export all email older than a few years and delete them from your mail client. eM Client does an excellent job of this by keeping the folder structure, and prefixing each email with the date. You don’t even need eM Client to access them later. Any application capable of opening eml files will work. Simply click on the file and it opens - no need to import or restore into an application before you can read it.

Yeah … but even if you outsource 2/3 of those emails, you still have well over 30,000 emails in 2 folders. The question to ask is, what do I need an eM client for, if in the end I should even pay for it? To send and receive a few e-mails? For this, every other standard program is sufficient. An additional investment only makes sense if I have an additional benefit. And a database in 2017 should not have such problems with 500,000 records, but also with 1 million or 5 million records. Already in 1995 I processed larger quantities with MS-Access. Big data is reality. Since it is not very effective to point out that one could indeed outsource data. It does not matter if you can do it, the program - if it should be good - still needs to work properly. And the big added value of eM-Client I can not currently recognize. I have some advantages here and there with a few details. But there are a lot of disadvantages with important things (just now I had to wait over an hour again … Database Check ;-( … that’s no fun).

If eM Client is not working for you, please use something else and save yourself any further disappointment.

If you do stick with eM Client, and continue to use it for business, you need to purchase a Pro License. There is no question of “if in the end I should even pay for it”. If you use a Free License for business purposes you are violating the Free License agreement that you agreed on when you registered for it.

yes, I’m using version 6 of eM Client.

Dear Gary, do not worry … I deleted eM-Client and finished the project. eM-Client has now cost me 3 weeks. I did not receive any added value. My conclusion: eM-client is a desaster … Nice meant by the creators, but does not meet their own claim. Too bad. Bye…