So here’s a crazy thing that just started happening to me. I thought my keyboard was failing on my laptop… I would try to type in the eM Client search box way on the upper right but some letters would consistently never appear. Letters like N and M, for example.
I also started discovering that some messages in my inbox were inexplicably showing as unread. Or being marked with little star/flag indicators. All of this was puzzling until I realized that as I was typing up in the search box, eM Client was treating some key presses as message hotkey commands… marking emails, moving emails, etc.
What’s happened? This was never like this before. I’m now reduced to having a notepad window running and typing any email searches in THERE then cutting/pasting into the eM Client search box.
I’ve spoken to others at my company who also are having similar issues with their Search box. This can’t just be our machines and no one else’s… what is causing this behavior?
I’ve isolated it further, BTW…
If i start typing in the search box and the suggestions or recent searches menu pops up, THEN is when this awful behavior manifests (and using the “N” key or the “S” key will start marking messages in my inbox or whatever)
If I his [ESC] so that the suggestions box goes away, then I can still type “N” or “S” normally. Until the pop up appears again.
This happens because you have used custom keyboard shortcuts, and changed the defaults to single letter options. So as you are typing that letter in the search box, the shortcut is fired.
Go to Menu > Settings > General > Shortcuts, and select any single letter options you have. You can use the Reset to default option to put it back to a safe combination.
These aren’t “custom” shortcuts, though… they are just the default shortcuts in most mail clients, including eM Client.
[EDIT: so, this is strange… using the “Reset” option changed some of my shortcuts, however I have no recollection of ever setting them. I have been using eM Client forever. Could this be a legacy setting from an old version? Could my migration from Thunderbird years and years ago have pushed these settings to eM Client? Using “N” and “B” for “next message” and “previous message” for example. Or using “S” to flag/star a message.]
Regardless, it really seems like there is no reason on earth that any such shortcut should be active or trigger-able if someone is typing in the search box. The shortcuts aren’t active if the user is, say, composing a mail message. Why would users want hotkey shortcuts to move or flag messages when they’re typing in a text field?
As Gary alluded to, going into the Menu > Settings > General > Shortcuts section and changing any keyboard hotkey which is a letter like “N” or “S” or “A” or whatever will probably prevent this behavior. I hesitate to call this a “solution” since it prevents most people from using common mail interface shortcuts, but c’est la vie.
