I just installed and tried out the eM client for the first time (after Microsoft managed to once again take away crucial functionality in Outlook), and I do like a lot of what I see. There is one massive showstopper, however, which is the rudimentary support for conversations. Now, I do understand that many people here seem to be happy to have at least some support for conversations where there was none at all before, but what is there now is near-useless for anyone used to full-featured email clients.
The main issue really is that the message list has no meaningful support for conversations at all. For any email client on this planet that supports conversations (web/browser-based or desktop), I will get a message list that displays and allows me to select individual messages in a conversation, so I can, for example, move, copy or delete individual messages in a conversation. In some cases I will even get a nicely structured view with varying indentation of messages to indicate the structure of the conversation. eM, on the other hand, does no such thing, and simply gives me a bunch of messages in the message view. Sure, that’s better than nothing at all, but only marginally so.
I have a hard time believing that anybody in his right mind would consider this their final word on conversation support, so my question really is, is there any indication of when eM might have real support for conversations? At least for me, until such time this client is not a contender, as much as I would like it to be.
For better or worse, eM Client adopted the Gmail approach to conversations, as opposed to say, the Outlook approach. This is presumably because Gmail customers make up a high proportion of their user base.
I, like you, would have initially preferred the message list approach, but after using eM Client’s implementation for sometime, I find it very usable (btw, the indented stuff like on Thunderbird drives me nuts).
I know it’s all a matter of taste, but try it, you might end up liking it.
Well, unfortunately, like I said, this is an absolute showstopper for me. I also happen to be in the camp of users who feel that the Gmail interface is one of the most terrible abominations of an email interface anywhere. So, if the current half-baked interface is all we’ll ever get with eM, then it’s not a viable option for me. Microsoft has said that they will improve their search functionality, and I’m sure sometime soon they’ll offer a unified Inbox, too. That means there’s at least hope on that front, so I’ll keep living with the idiosyncrasies of Outlook.
I had my reservations, but Jay is right; I was not so enthusiastic at first about this implementation of conversations, but ended up liking it. Sure it needs some development also, so put your suggestions forward and let’s see what happens.
As with most things, there is some resistance being accustomed to one thing and then changing to or trying another. If you really want the functionality that was there in a previous version of Outlook, why not simply downgrade rather than living with the current version? But if you are looking for something new and fresh, conversations in eM Client certainly are in line with the polished views that I think defines eM Client. It may appear simplified, but after using eM Client you will discover that it is a full-featured email client, or as full-featured as any. I don’t think there is one email client anywhere that is all things to all people, though Thunderbird may come close.
I regularly delete messages from conversations, so don’t see where you are having difficulty with this. Simply right click on the message in the message detail, and copy, move or delete it.
Well, as has been noted before, different people have different requirements and usage patterns. I work as a mid-level executive at an organization of non-trivial size, with a couple of departments underneath the unit I am directing. The email volume I need to manage personally (outside of what my assistant can take care of as a delegate) is substantial, and is ultimately captured in a fairly sophisticated structure of folders/subfolders. So, I may be dealing with conversations containing dozens of messages including various subthreads, and I regularly have situations where I need to take a subset of these messages and move them to a separate (sub)folder.
So, for this kind of scenario
it is extremely valuable, if not mandatory, to have a list view that indicates the structure of non-trivial conversation threads, and
there is currently no efficient way to deal with this in eM. Oh goody, I’d really look forward to clicking through an unstructured list of some 20+ messages, trying to somehow figure out what subthread they each belong to, and then right-clicking on each of the ones that should go into a different folder in order to move them. As I said, this is not a negotiable requirement.
I will note that I have little patience for the kind of argument that says the developers have not deigned to include this feature, so nobody needs it. This line of thought belongs into Apple support forums, not here.
Having said that, I want to make it clear that I am not asking for anything here, and I fully understand that I am not in a position to do so; the question I was asking is if the feature I need will be included in a future release. If it is not, then eM is not a viable option for me, and there is no point in me wasting anymore of my time considering it.
I understand. I had been using the Conversations addon in Thunderbird and it was almost perfect for my needs. It did a fairly decent job of sub-conversations in the message list, but I hated what it did to the message body.
I am not so clear as to what eM Client has planned. Still, I put forward my suggestions and ideas, and remain enthusiastic even though not getting an official response from them is frustrating.