Selective sync of account components (mail/calender/contacts/tasks)

On mobile devices (smartphones/tablets), when you connect an account you generally have the option to choose what you want to sync (e.g. mail, contacts, calender, etc). On eM client (like other desktop clients I have used) it seems to be all or nothing. So I can’t, for example, choose just to sync contacts and calender, and not sync mail & tasks for any given account. Is this true or have I overlooked a setting?

Hi, this depends on what mail service are you using with eM Client, if you go to Tools > Accounts and use for example a Gmail account, you can disable the services for the account if you select the account and check the tabs available. But every mail service is different with Gmail you can disable receiving emails, sending emails or contacts and calendars, but you can’t for example disable just tasks or just contacts or just calendars.

I hope this helps,
Paul.

Paul, thanks for getting back to me. Please consider allowing more control over what aspects of the account get synced in the future.

For my interest, are you able to comment on why this is a ubiquitous feature on smartphone/tablets (which all seem to allow individual choice of email, contacts, calenders sync on all accounts I use) but lacking in em client (as well as windows desktop mail clients in general).

Is it somehow more complicated to achieve with windows desktop software?

It depends on what protocol/service is used for the account. And also depends on what features are supported by the server.
As I mentioned previously it’s possible with a lot of mail services to chose what services you want to use.

Thank you,
Paul.

You’re saying it depends on the server (as oppose to the client). But what’s not clear to me is why my phone and tablet are able to separate the services more finely than eM client and have had this functionality (at least in the case of the iPad, which I’ve had for longer) for quite a long time.

Gmail

  • My Android phone & my iPad give me the choice to separately sync mail, contacts, calender, and notes. 
  • eM Client gives my the choice to separately sync mail, [calender and contacts together], and chat. i.e cannot choose to separate calender and contacts.

Outlook.com 

  • My Android phone (setup as Exchange) gives me choice to separately sync mail, contacts, calender, and tasks 
  • My iPad (setup as outlook.com account) gives me the choice to separately sync mail, contacts, calender, and reminders.
  • eM Client does not give me any choice to separately sync any of the services. 

Do you use different protocols/services to that used by smartphones/tablets perhaps?
If so, why? 

Hi again, I consulted the issue with the developers we agree that this might be a bit confusing for users. It can be done in some clients, because they use different way of handling the received data from the server.

I’ve been told this could be done with our application as well (so my previous statement was wrong and I’m sorry for that), however since there were no requests on implementing this it wasn’t added.

We’re currently considering changing this for future releases.

Thank you for understanding, sorry for the confusion,
Paul.

Ok thanks. I hope you do add this to future releases. It seems to me to be a common limitation of all Windows desktop mail clients that I’ve tried in comparison to smartphones/tablets as well as in comparison to the capabilities built in OS X (if I remember correctly from when I was using a Mac).