Okay guys, I think I figured out how to make eMClient portable, as in run it from your USB thumb drive, memory card, external HDD or wherever you want.
I am really new here and I’ve been looking for a replacement email/calender client for my trusty old Thunderbird portable for quite some time and decided to give emClient a
try, but I am obcessed about portable apps, even at my home computer so I was desperate to get emClient to work portably.
Anyway after some hacking around I came to this hack.
Disclaimer: I am no programer, just a “power user”, so I don’t know if this breaks anything, or violates the software license. (To the developers: I don’t mean to do anything illegal here).
Notice: This is not a fully portable “stealth” solution, the emClient folder in your Windows profile is still created although it is not really used. Also I tried it only on the free version, not sure if it works on the commercial one, due application differences or license file storage or retrieval.
So here is how to do it
- Copy your emClient installation folder to wherever you want it to rest (thumb drive, external hard drive etc.) lets say
F:\Applications\emClient
- Create a new empty text file in
F:\Applications
- Save this file with watever name you want but with the extension
.bat (not txt)
Lets say ``` eMClientPortable.bat
4. Open this ``` eMClientPortable.bat ``` file in notepad and write the following
cd emclient
start mailclient.exe /dblocation .\databasepath
5. Where ``` .\databasepath ``` is the relative path to the folder on your drive where emClient will place the database files. Customize it as you like but keep it relative so it compensates for Windows drive letter changes)
6. If you have a previous database you would like to use just copy it to this new location, which in this case would be ``` F:\Applications\emClient ``` ``` \databasepath ```
7. Now launch your new emclient always from this new ``` eMClientPortable.bat ```
8. Ta-Da! Enjoy your new emClient Portable
You may later use some applications to convert the new bat to an exe if you like, just search the web for bat to exe
Also if, like me, you don't like to run installers you extract your em client msi installer with the following command. Open cmd.exe, Start Menu\>run\>cmd, and then type this:
``` msiexec /a d:\path\to\installer.msi /qb TARGETDIR=d:\destination\directory\for\extracting ```
If anyone has a comercial version of eMClient and would like to test if this works please let us know. I may consider buying this software if it actually works.
Edit: Formatting messed up my code