I’ve just set up eM Client as Thunderbird replacement yesterday, bought a license, downloaded all my e-mail from IMAP servers (ca. 100Gb), faced several problems, searched this forum a lot, found similar problems by other users discussed long ago… and no solutions. So instead of asking the same questions Nth time, I’d like to raise a more generic topic.
At least 2 blocking issues for successful migration to eM Client were repeatedly answered in the same manner: “we comply to the standards, your mail server doesn’t, it’s not our problem, won’t fix”. Namely:
CalDAV servers not sending calendar invites, though they ought to. Search “caldav invites not sent” - that issue was reported multiple times for years. I faced it with Axigen mail server, which may be not the most popular option, but people reported it with Apple and Google. Reaction - “we rely on CalDAV server doing it, won’t do anything on our side”. Whereas a simple fix is self-evident - add an option to send invites via mail client for CalDAV account if the server for some reason doesn’t do what is expected.
Malformed from/to addresses displayed as “[email protected]”. Searching the forum for this “address” also finds many topics. You can get invalid from/to headers for many reasons. In my case it’s old emails imported from MS Exchange, which were sent inside organization. Exchange doesn’t (or didn’t many years ago when these emails were sent) use proper email addresses within one server, from and to fields contain just base64-encoded usernames. Every other mail client I know tolerates this and displays these headers as is, although they are not RFC-compliant. And this allows at least to get meaningful search results - actually, the only thing you expect from the old mail archive…
Unfortunately, users of mail clients rarely can change anything on the mail server side. And even if a server misbehaves and doesn’t follow RFCs strictly - if the problem is widespread enough, it makes sense for a mail client to provide workarounds. In fact, that’s what other mail clients actually do in the 2 cases mentioned above.
Is there any chance that this purist approach changes? I really liked eM Client’s clean UI and speed, but these issues are forcing me to return to Thunderbird
In most cases it is up to the server to send the invitation. If it isn’t sending it, that is a server issue, and you will need to ask the calendar provider for assistance. But if you have a Pro license, open a support ticket with us and we will send some instructions to create logs, which we can use to see what the issue is.
If the email address is not correctly composed, we display nobody@ rather than just leaving it blank. Again, if you have a Pro license, open a support ticket with us and we can investigate if the issue is server related, or the actual messages you imported has faulty headers.
In some cases it is not possible. For example with the server that says it will send the invite, we say OK and let it do that, because it said it would. There is no way to confirm if it actually does or not at that point, other than to later ask the participant if they got the invite.
Yes, these are server issues, I wrote it. In both cases I know it, and I know I can’t fix it (neither change CalDAV server behavior, nor fix malformed headers in 15 years old emails).
In both cases it could be fixed by eM Client workarounds, which were requested in this forum multiple times already, but ignored. In both cases Thunderbird and Outlook provide such workarounds.
But it looks like it’s a fundamental position of eM Client developers to be proud of their standard compliance instead and expect the rest of the world change… Well then, back to Thunderbird.
Either you didn’t read my post or you’re pretending you didn’t.
I’ve spent several hours setting up eM Client and investigating these issues. Workarounds exist, are implementable, are in fact implemented by other clients, and were suggested in this forum multiple times already. See this comment and the whole topic it’s in - it’s about the same problem with almost the same words. If you search the forum with the strings I mentioned - you’ll find many more similar topics here, and every single one is either unanswered or answered “won’t fix, persuade your server owner to fix it instead” (even if it’s Apple or Google).
I did open the support ticket indeed, but only to request a money-back (left a link to this thread in case they care). Sorry, not going to spend several hours more talking with the support to get the same replies.
Sure, we do offer a 30 day money back guarantee if that is what you want. Or if you change your mind and would like us to investigate the issues, please open a support ticket with us and we will assist you further.
I don’t see one. If you want to open a ticket, you will find a link in the Help menu in eM Client, and login details for the Helpdesk in the email sent to you with your license key.
Wondering if eM Client could possibly eg: program an option in the “Calendar Properties” for CalDAV online calendar accounts (similar to what Thunderbird does with the Lightning add-on / plugin which schedules below) to then “send online calendar invitations locally instead”, for the CalDAV servers which just don’t seem to send, due to they either “don’t have online scheduling invitation capabilities” or their online calendar scheduling server just “doesn’t seem to ever send invitations for some unknown reason”.
“To enable it, switch to the calendar or task view, and right-click on the respective caldav calendar and select the properties item in the context menu”.
“Now, you just check the option “Prefer client-side email scheduling”, which is available below the dropdown list to select an email identity. This option will be only visible for CalDAV calendars but not for any other type of calendar”.
