Gary, after deactivating Windows Defender and Windows Firewall and restarting the system, eM Client started within seconds.
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Windows Defender seems to cause our trouble.
Def=off Fw=off => eM Client starts within 10 sec
Def=off Fw=on => eM Client starts within 10 sec
Def=on Fw=off => eM Client needs 4:30 min
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Hmm, interesting to see what Gary says about this.
Thank you. I added the MailClient.exe process to Windows Defender exceptions. As a temporary solution
Did that solve the issue?
If Windows Defender would consider “maliclient.exe” as Malware, we would get a warning message, when we start it. And Defender would try (or propose) to block it. That didn’t happen. Thus, putting “mailclient.exe” into the exception list cannot be the solution.
I tried it anyway for testing purposes. Effect: none - as expected.
Adding the complete folder “c:\Program Files (x86)\eM Client” to Defender’s exceptions list did the job: eM Client starts within seconds after booting Windows.
We should be aware, that this is a workaround, a trick, not a solution.
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I’m on v8, will the devs produce a fix for this, or has v8 been abandoned?
Any working theory or hypothesis as to why this is an issue only on some Windows machines and not others? i.e. what’s different between my Windows + Defender machine (where I don’t ever have this issue) and yours? Are your Defender settings different from mine? Or is there something else?
Actually, it is clearly a solution…it’s exactly why Defender, and other similar products, have whitelisting capabilities built-in. All anti-virus/anti-malware experience false positives.
It’s more productive to ask why is your (and others with the same experience) particular configuration, including Defender-related machine-specific behavior, having this issue?
Also, some relevant discussion here on Microsoft forum:
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This worked for me as well, excluding the whole folder. And, interestingly, I reinstalled Windows 11 yesterday because of this thing with eM Client, and it made no difference. Still hung.
I am running Windows 10 with Defender and I am not having that issue. So I agree with @mblatz that I suspect it might be some setting turned on in Defender that is doing extra checking, or maybe Defender runs differently in WIndows 11 vs Windows 10. That would explain why it works fine for some people, while others have this delay.
In the “Virus & threat protection” section of Defender I would look at if you have “Ransomware protection enabled” and “Controlled folder access enabled”. If so, try disabling those to see if that helps. The only other thing you might look at is if you have “Mandatory ASLR” turned on, which is in the “Exploit Protection” area under “App & browser control” section. Other then those that stand out, you could always play with the Defender settings to see which one might be causing this issue.
Not sure about that, unless something has changed recently. Worked perfectly fine on W11 for about a year for me. This behaviour only started a few days ago.
Certainly in my case, I don’t have Ransomware protection enabled, nor do I have Mandatory ASLR set to on, so I guess we can discount them.
If it worked fine on W11 for awhile, and it only recently started happening on a version of eM Client you have been using for awhile (eM Client was not upgraded to cause the issue), then I can only assume some update was pushed to Windows that changed the behavior of Defender in a way it might have started blocking some traffic from eM Client. I figure if Defender thought it was a virus it would warn you about that. I will have to watch this thread to see what gets discovered since at this point I have nothing else to suggest. It was worth checking the Defender settings to see what might have stood out. I just wanted to jump into the thread to say it doesn’t seem to be happening on all desktops using Defender, but it does sound like to be an issue with Defender if excluding the eM Client install directory fixes it.
Yep, that makes sense.
Adding the complete folder “c:\Program Files (x86)\eM Client” to Defender’s exceptions list did the job: eM Client starts within seconds after booting Windows.
I also have never added any exception in Windows Defender for eM Client V8 or V9 at all using Windows 10 or 11 to get eM Client to load quickly. I would reset Windows Defender & the Firewall back to defaults as something screwy going on there if you have to add eM Client as an exception.
As you can see from my post above, I reinstalled W11 yesterday because of this issue, and I saw the same behaviour with Defender etc. on default.
Same issue here, started this morning. Had to add c:\Program Files (x86)\eM Client folder as an exclusion in Defender to workaround the issue (Windows 11 Pro 21H2 (22000.556) with eM Client 9.0.1361
No comment from anyone at eM Client on this?
I have to ask again, as I got no reply previously, would there be a fix for this issue on v8, or is it dead now?
I already did.
There is nothing that needs or can be done from eM Client’s side. You just need to configure your OS security.