It’s said that eM Client handles Gmail’s labels, but I can’t see that being done. Maybe it’s actually being done under the hood, but the interface does not reflect this. The first thing I expected to see was the labels each message has in my inbox or any other folder, but that doesn’t happen. I also wanted to assign and remove labels, but there’s no such option. I can copy or move to a folder (i.e., assign a new label, keeping or removing the present one), but that’s not easy, quick nor intuitive.
In fact, I really can’t see why any of this is so difficult, as any difficulty has hardly anything to do with labels being seen as folder by desktop email clients. Indeed, if the program recognizes the “duplicate” message in multiple folders (labels) as one, it could simply show “author+subject+date/time+LABEL1+LABEL2” in the folder message listing instead of merely “author+subject+date/time”. That doesn’t seem hard.
And the menu for adding/removing could simply mean this: when the marks a label (folder) the message gets copied to it, and when the label (folder) gets unmarked the message is removed from it. That’s not hard either.
Of course, these UI changes could be seen as Gmail-only, but turning it on and off (or combining both ways of dealing with folders, which might be useful or necessary for when the user combines Gmail and non-Gmail accounts) can’t that any harder than the other two.
(After that, labels’ colors matching original ones in Gmail would be great, but that’s superfluous near the above…)