I have been using eM Client for a couple of years now, and don’t usually have any problems, however this is the third time this has happened, and it’s a major problem for me. Out of the blue, eM Client downloaded ALL of my old emails from both Comcast and GMail, so that I am now left with about 10,000 “unread” emails. I had only 150 unread emails this morning, and now I have 10,000! It’s going to be a real pain to go through them, figure out which ones were really unread, and delete, delete, delete. I have not changed anything on my system, but this is the third time this has happened. Please don’t tell me that’s what it is supposed to do! It isn’t! For six months it has only pulled new email from Comcast like it’s supposed to. Now this morning it decided to download everything–absolutely everything that is on my Comcast account.
To make things worse, when I see this is happening, there is not even any way to STOP the download. How do you shut off send/receive? What a mess!
Hello Jean,
this is a rather curious issue, are both of these accounts set up as IMAP? Do you perhaps, just sporadically, check these email accounts on another device/client/webmail where they may be set up with a different protocol?
As for stopping the sync, you should always be able to end synchronization by switching to Offline mode in File>Work offline. However, if the messages are unread on the server, eM Client will synchronize to that once you turn the offline mode off again (but it can give you time to check if the change happened in eM Client or on the server). eM client cannot mark these messages as such on its own.
Thanks for the reply. No, my GMail is IMAP, and only has a handful of emails. My main email is Comcast and is POP3. No, they are not set up on other devices. This is the third time this has happened, and it took me hours to delete all of the duplicated emails.
Upon looking at this again, I saw that anything on the Comcast server that had already been marked as “read” was downloaded onto eMClient and marked “unread.” Anything on Comcast marked as “unread” was also downloaded, so that the actual unread emails downloaded twice, but the “read” emails downloaded again to eMClient as unread.
I did nothing different either on the server end or on eMClient, so I don’t know the cause or how to prevent this from happening again. Last time this happened, eMClient support was not able to give me a solution or explanation either.
This has been happening once every few months for the last couple of years for me too. I’d be reading my email and everything is fine, step away from my computer for a few minutes, and come back to see em client downloading my messages from last year all over again.
I have visited this forum many times looking to see if it has been solved. Still waiting even for the issue to be acknowledged as .
(BTW … I’ve seen this both at home and at work on different computers (Windows 7, 8.1 Pro, and Windows 10)
That’s what is so frustrating. It keeps happening, but they don’t acknowledge it as a problem. Last time I reported it I was told that’s what is “supposed” to happen. Sheesh!
I do you have other clients (smart phone, tablet, other PC with web interface, Windows mail … etc.)
None of them re-download old emails.
Em Client is supposed to mirror what’s on the server. Once. Unless the locally stored database is prone to corruption and has to be rebuilt often (maybe?)
You might want to try changing the protocol that you use with Comcast to IMAP. By using POP3, the emails are physically downloaded to eM Client from the server and there is no link between eM Client and the server. If eM Client sees the email as being unread on the server (for whatever reason that is), it will download the emails again.
If you use IMAP, eM Client is in essence only displaying what is on the server itself. If an email is deleted in eM Client, it is deleted on the server. There would be no downloading of unread emails over and over again since you are just viewing what is on the server (and there is no flag that can be reset).
That’s an option, I guess, but I do like having the emails on my own PC. This problem has happened three times over the past couple of years, so it’s not like an everyday occurrence. I hate to have to change my setup just to accommodate a bug in eMClient. Thanks for the info, though. I appreciate it!
Just to let you know, even if you use IMAP, eM Client will keep a copy of your emails cached on your PC. So, even if I am not on the Internet, I can still see my emails.
The biggest thing about using IMAP is that whatever function you perform on the email on your laptop are also being performed on the server. So if you mark an email as read or delete it, that function is performed on the server. This way if you go to another computer, you don’t see that email that you just deleted off the previous computer.
Hi Jean,
by setting to Download emails for offline use in the IMAP tab of the setting in Tools>Accounts you will have your messages downloaded for offline use.
If you use the same account on other deviced with IMAP, it could be that you mark them as unread… and any unread mails are downloaded through the POP protocol. That is not a bug but how POP protocol works.
Okay, I’m furious again! The same thing is happening with downloading ALL of my emails again, both read and unread! I have emailed support about this so many times, I guess I really should give up. Does anyone here know of another email client program that works? I love emclient, but I can’t stand going through this torture every few months.
Hello Jean,
have you changed your account setup to IMAP as has been previously discussed in this thread?
It’s difficult to troubleshoot this issue since we’d need the POP protocol logs from the time this issue happens to analyze the problem, if the server just randomly sends all the messages as new ones or if it’s indeed something within eM Client.
Next time this issue starts happening, please switch to Offline mode immediately (File>Work Offline).
Set POP logs in Tools>Settings>Advanced.
Restart eM Cleint.
Turn it back to Online mode (Uncheck the Work offline option).
If the messages continue downloading again, let it do so for a while so that it is marked in the logs.
Then go to the Advanced settings again and click Send logs.
Change recipient to [email protected]
Add a link to this forum topic in the body of the message.
Well, this same thing has happened twice again over the past week. Everything works great for months, then all of a sudden I’ll see thousands of “unread” emails in my inbox, even though I have already read some of them and deleted them. They were all there in my box again. I have not changed any settings. I am really getting sick of spending hours and hours deleting these “unread” emails. The worst thing is that I can’t just delete the whole bunch because SOME of them really are unread. I hope EMClient has finally found out the cause of this.
I still have not received a response to my email of 2 weeks ago with this same problem, and it just happened AGAIN just now. I am just sitting at my desktop, using Firefox to browse, and I switched to my email and see that I now have 1,434 new unread emails! Many of them are duplicates. I have not used any other device but my computer. This has been happening over and over again, and I don’t get any response as to how to fix it. So now I will have to spend hours AGAIN going over all of these to see which ones I actually have read, which ones are important, etc. Why is it so hard to get any tech support on this problem?