I’m looking for a new email client to replace Outlook Express and liking what I see with eM Client so far.
My main concern at this point is reliability. We use POP for email access and we have a lot of family history research in emails and its important that this information not be lost (I think about 5gb worth of email). We run regular backups but I’ve read a few posts about database corruptions that haven’t been recoverable. This is a major concern. Outlook Express is far from reliable but I’ve always been able to recover after a corrupted dbx file.
Am I overly concerned and what’s the best way to ensure that after a database corruption I can get back to where I was with as little effort as possible.
I’m assuming that if I take backups more regularly than the period for which emails are deleted from the pop server, I can just go back to the last backup and re-“send and receive” to get back received emails. But I presume that’s not going to work for sent items, drafts, contacts etc…
Also, I noticed that Microsoft Live Mail now stores all it’s emails in plain .eml file format - so aside from a file system corruption, there’s nothing really to get corrupted. There is a database it uses, but nothing that can’t be reconstructed from the .eml files. Can eM client do this, or are there plans for something similar?
you can always set auto backup in Tools - Settings - General - backup to some very low value
for changing format of saved emails, we do not plan it, having them in database makes searching very fast, but eM Client supports .eml so you can import and export it to this file manually by File - Export, or right click and save as
I already have a separate automated backup process that ideally would be updated to include emclient’s data. That raises a couple more questions though:
Does emclient keep its data files locked or in a non-consistent state while running. The backup process I use runs against a volume shadow copy of the data drive - will this approach work with emclient?
If emclient’s database does become corrupt - is it immediately obvious? With Outlook Express sometimes a folder’s dbx file may become corrupt but we’ve not noticed until after a backup has run - making restoring from backup pointless.
With the emclient’s automated backup, what is the format of the backed up data - a copy of the db files, or an export format?
Thanks for your help and sorry for all the questions, but the whole point of switching email clients is data reliability so I have to be confident with it.
separate automatic backup usually brokes eM Client data when it do anything with its database and eM Client saves or reads anything from it.
when eM client runs its own backup data it needs to be shut down first to prevent corruption mentioned above, and data files are locked.
yes, it usually crashes and shows error message. Of course depends what data has been broken and it can take a while until eM Client tries to read broken sector.
it is .zip file
no need to be sorry you have questions about our product and we answer them for you, that is why we run this forum
