Fine-tuning emClient 7.1 beta - improvement feedback & wishlist

Crashing eM Client
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To emClient support:

I am contemplating the move from Outlook (which I have used for several years), to emClient - mainly to sync automatically - not just email, but also contacts, calendar, tasks and notes. I am in the process of testing both the emClient 7.0 stable release and emClient 7.1 beta, after testing several other email clients over the past 2-3 weeks.

My initial impression is that emClient is a worthy and excellent alternative to Outlook for typical usage. Yes, emClient may not have all the fancy and detailed features of Outlook, but on the other hand, it also has some useful features that Outlook lacks. Fantastic effort, on the part of the entire emClient team…keep up the good work!

Anyway, I now have some observations and also a personal wish-list which I submit for the consideration of the hard-working developers at emClient:

  1. At times, emClient takes a very long time to load and sync - I am testing it with about 6 IMAP accounts, with about 50,000 emails totally over these 6 accounts and about 4,000 contacts. In comparison, Outlook loads the same accounts much faster. Very often, the Smart Folder (All Inboxes) does not load at all and it keeps showing the sync symbol, while in the left navigation bar it states that 'Last sync completed…". There is, therefore, some display issue when a large quantity of emails needs to be show in the ‘All Inboxes’ folder. This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, as it even crashes emClient often.

  2. Also, in case emClient is shut down unexpectedly, it takes a long time to check the data files before loading - sometimes, even 10-15 minutes long, during which time emClient is inaccessible. In comparison, Outlook loads the program and then does the data file check in the background, so Outlook is immediately accessible to the user.

  3. Please provide RTF/HTML headers for replies and forwards in emClient (like Outlook does, which looks real good). Right now, while I can control the text of the headers, editing of it can only be done in plain text format - which looks boring and old. I know this is a cosmetic point, but even a small cosmetic touch like this can make your product’s email message look better overall, to the recipient.

  4. I am glad that you have the provision to create RTF/HTML signatures. However, a strange thing happens when a signature is used for a reply or forward. When no signature is used for a reply, a single line space is introduced above the original message and the text being typed for the reply. Whereas, when a signature is used, a triple (3) line space is introduced between the original message and the text being typed for a reply, which looks awkward. Please maintain the single line spacing in both cases - which will make all outgoing messages look uniform in style.

  5. In Contacts - please provide the option to enter a year (or not) for birthdays and anniversaries. Sometimes, all that is required is to have the day and month, while the year is not important. So, maybe a toggle in that field to provide a year or not?

  6. Notes is an important feature in Outlook and some other email clients. Do you have any plan to introduce Notes in emClient? I use Google Keep, so if you do introduce Notes in emClient, it would be great if it can also sync with Google Keep.

Finally - when do you plan to release the stable version of emClient 7.1?

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I am also an EmClient user for about 18 months.   I too echo your observations.  
I am monitoring 5 email accounts - hosted by Google, Yahoo, and a private Outlook server.  The main reason I use EmClient is that Outlook has a bug the prevents it from handling emails from mixed servers.  Imap vs Microsoft.   EmClient does this with ease.

Some issues I have noted with EmClient are:

  1. It seems fragile.  It will often lose contact with a process or window which requires me to use Task Manager to kill the process.  Then you must go through the long rebuild cycle.
  2. Something similar happens if EmClient is running for long periods in the background.   I  find it trying to sync to a server and it seems to have lost contact.  If you kill it, or even shrink the window, the program crashes – Rebuild required again.
  3. The Contacts database needs some tweaks. 
  4. It would be nice to have a separate window where you can load  contacts / or calender, and still read emails.