However, many of us are - I doubt the rather inflammatory title of this thread comes from someone who is not encountering problems.
Almost everyone here will be FREE users because there are other means (eg, raising a support ticket) for dealing with problems open to PRO. The odd PRO visitors have dropped comments suggesting the problems listed here are being reported to developers.
v7 is not that different to v8 in terms of user experience. A lot of the changes to v8 are “under the hood” rather than visible to end-users and I gather quite a proportion of the underlying code has been re-written.
My experience is that v7 worked perfectly for me, but v8 introduces problems - things that used to work without error in v7 no longer work (sometimes at all, sometimes only intermittently) in v8. Hence I downgraded to v7 and everything works fine again. The only annoyance is the “nag” pop-up offering the upgrade to v8.2951 every time I restart eM Client.
I can’t accept the logic of your final point. I hope v8 becomes viable since eM Client has been my go-to client for the last couple of years without any problems! eM Client, working as advertised, is indeed a superior product to Outlook and Thunderbird. Did you try eM Client v7 with Sky Yahoo mail? Possibly that would have worked fine as well.
The phenomena we “decriers” are encountering is that lots of us who had no problems with v7 find their workflow is so messed up by v8 that we either renounce the programme completely or (like me) downgrade back to v7. Maybe since you are encountering no problems whatsoever you cannot understand why we are frustrated, but implying criticism of our decrying v8 simply because it works well for your particular Sky Yahoo mail set-up doesn’t invalidate (or address) any of the many, many problems the vast majority of those posting here over the last few months are having.
As to whether I would go PRO or not: if you want/need to extra features then I’d go for it since you are having no problems whatsoever. For me, the problems with v8 are so diverse and widespread (so many users complaining of so many different problems) I wouldn’t throw money at a program the develpoers appear to have messed up quite badly and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else does until they are confident that the issues we are reporting here are addressed in a new release.
A very broad assumption! I have been a Pro user for years but still like to browse the forum to pick up tips and give help where I can. I ‘upgraded’ to 8 after paying for the upgrade. I was so satisfied with 7 that I was full of anticipation for 8 but was disappointed and immediately downgraded to 7. Bulley for all those who don’t have problems with 8 but it’s being disingenuous to cast aspersions on those who are experiencing problems. I didn’t find much wrong with 8 but I disliked the look and feel so it’s unlikely I’ll upgrade again even when they have fixed the software problems.
As an aside, I wonder if EMC devs have been contacting those who say they have no issues to log their setups. Might help to identify the causes of the reported malfunctions.
@rafikiphoto When I say “almost everyone” and one person (you) replies dissenting, do you not feel that you exaggerate your importance in the weighted average of all participants in this forum? Very broad assumption or not, I’ll stick with my “almost everyone”. If that’s okay…
Not that I disagree with the rest of your comment - we seem to be agreeing with my reaction that it’s inappropriate to write-off those who are experiencing problems (although your response reads as though you are accusing me of doing so… odd.).
As that rare beast, a PRO user, you might know what the rest of us do not.
Are the same problems being reported in whatever support fora that are available to only PRO users?
Is there any reaction from eMC developers with regard to addressing ony of the many technical faults introduced in v8 - which are reported as being the reasons for abandonning eMC or downgrading to v7?
It would be useful to know whether the relatively small number of people who have found v8 completely unusable here is matched by similar concerns within the PRO community!
There is no dedicated Pro forum which is why I believe there are more Pro users here than you may think. There is VIP support for specific help requests and that used to have have a very fast response time. That has changed from hours to several days now so you might infer they are swamped! Pro users don’t have any other privileges or access to more information.
Tell me, as a Free user, do you see loads of advertisements or other money-making schemes from EMC? If not I’d be interested to know more about their business model.
No - no adverts or anything like that. That might be one way they could have chosen to make money out of FREE licences, but do not at present. Same product as far as I can see.
Funnily enough, given your question, I am simply using eM Client v7 for my venerable live.com account as a replacement for the outlook.com webpage interface - because of the volume of ads there slows it down so badly. It took ages to open a mail because of ads loading - with a functioning eM Client the only reason I go there is to tweak server-side rules (forwarding, blackilisting etc) which eM Client cannot propagate from client back to the server.
I have always assumed eM Client is targeted at revenue streams organisations/business users but was free for personal use. A bit like the CCleaner model from Piriform. This often works for small business start-ups who have a good experience from using eM Client for personal use and go on to recommend it for a corporate standard.
As with earlier releases, when you start on eM Client v8 you get a short period of gratis PRO licence functionality and then drop back down to FREE status. For me this transition from the heavens down to terra firma was just a “huh?” moment of staggering banality. There appears to be no difference in terms of interface or functionality between FREE and PRO - just the ability to manage more than two accounts, vis. article here.
Hence any problem in FREE should be a problem in PRO also; the converse is not true, I suppose, since trivially the ability to have, say, 3 email accounts open in PRO might be causing issues which those of us who can only use 1 or 2 accounts in FREE will not experience.
It’s such a pity. eM Client v7 met (meets) my needs so well, I’d consider paying but have no need for the commercial or multiple account management benefits that PRO confers. For me v8 breaks so much basic workflow that I could never use it. Surprising that you found it problem-free but ditched it because you didn’t like the look and feel: my experience was the opposite since I saw little difference between the look and feel of v7 and v8, but had many problems with mail sync, calendars, AV conflicts, mail handling rules etc. that rendered it unsable.
If v8 does not evolve into viability, I wonder how long we can continue to use our downgraded v7 before changes to underlying operating systems make v7 unusable…
Please get involved with this post about version the Pro trial of version 8. It’s a request to stop all future downloads from being a “Pro Trial” and to continue updating eM Client the way it has been updated with free and paid for licenses.
Thanks for all the advice and info. Having had no problems I have elected to go for the pro version despite my reservations that eM is not quite the finished product yet. I will continue to visit this forum for friendly advice, info and trending difficulties with the programme. Those decrying free version customers are devoid of manners and should be left in their boxes.
If v8 does not evolve into viability, I wonder how long we can continue to use our downgraded v7 before changes to underlying operating systems make v7 unusable
Well, probably forever. I still can run my old Eudora 7 (I keep it for archive reason) and is discontinued for so many years. I still can use Opera Mail that is discontinued (and I think eM Client is based on many Opera Mail ideas). There is nothing really new if we’re talking about email handling. Even Opera Mail that uses Presto engine (that is no longer used and end of life in Opera 12 version) is fully functional, because emails do not need complex html/css (well, some of them may need it - we all know what type of emails mostly).
But - do not expect so many changes you want. I am paid customer and I ask for some fixes / improvements for really long time. This is not company that cares so much about community. It’s different business model - they release program that includes their ideas and users may like it or not. If you see a bug (like for example - serious bug in search) you’ll get answer like “it’s not a bug, it’s designed that way” or “we will consider it” (which means mostly “nobody cares” - there is not even “todo” list anywhere for customers to check if their ideas or bugs are on that list).
Before I bought eM Client, I read lot of posts in the past. And I never seen that any option was added to this program because community wants it. So far I have list of 16 bugs / feature requests and counting. And I stopped believe that any of them will be ever made. It’s more like “we know better” attitude. I expected more. I believe some time ago that being active and actively help with beta testing at least will allow me to highlight some problems.
@homeap Thanks for your thoughts. I agree with most of what you say, though I think you might have been lucky with Eudora.
I have my fingers crossed for eM Client… I really just need the basic working functions of v7 to be there in the new version, rather than needing for a slew of new features. For example, is it not possible that new unread mail, moved to a sub-folder by a server-side rule cannot automatically appear in “unread”? Does so in v7 but no hope in v8…
That said, there seem to be new problems all the time with genuinely basic functionality: calendars, AV interference with server synchronisation, screen resolutions … not issues I have encountered myself, but enough to suggest v8 is still far from “release-ready”.
I’m with you, David. I will stick with v7 until it dies a natural death even though I have paid for an upgrade to v8. Perhaps we could prevail on EMC to give us a switch to turn off the ‘new version’ notification each time v7 starts.
I have put in a support ticket requesting this feature for v7.
@Steven_E_Long Sorry to hear your experience with v8 was bad like mine - I have downgraded and actually find v7 perfectly adequate for my needs save the recurrent nag screen.
Maybe I am not judging the tenor of your response correctly - obviously the part of my post you quote has too many negatives. it meant “no-one would have entitled this post as they did if they didn’t have problems!” Please be in no doubt - I was hugely disappointed in v8 and remain so.
Not so. I find the Forum very useful for ironing out “how to” issues. If you’ve found a “bug” that can’t be resolved by other users then the way to go is via another route which is the paid-for Pro-version. Don’t expect a good product like EM Client to provide you with developer support for free. They have to earn a living too and don’t have the same resources as the bigger players like MS.
The Pro version gives you access to raising “tickets” directly on the developers.
Sure, you can get support if you have problem with eM Client. But not so big support if it’s bug in client that doesn’t affect majority of users. You can get answer like “it’s designed that way” and that’s basically all. If you have feature request - PRO license gives you nothing. eM Client is not community based program where users have big impact on functionality. It’s product designed and created by (and only) programmers.
Is good enough to use it “as is”, but if you expect that having paid license gives you more attention and someone adds missing functionality or fix less important bugs (that needs more work and change something in program) - then no, it will probably not happen.
I’m happy that at this level eM Client 8 works without problems on my settings and with my accounts. I’m still waiting for fixing some minor bugs and/or add some important functionality. I hope some day at least one point from my list will be made.
Look. As a retired software developer and Chartered engineer who worked for a very large US company, it is no surprise that a smaller team of developers within eM Client are forced to prioritize workload and/or feature requests depending on how they see the market and how much income is coming through the door.
The forum is a community-based help facility that is MONITORED by the developers of eM Client - not necessarily responded to. If you want additional support then the Pro-licence is for you, but ultimately, like any other software product, if the features offered are not suitable for your requirements then you have a host of other products to choose from, and I guarantee none of them will please everyone all the time!
I moved from a “community-based” email client (Thunderbird) because it didn’t satisfy my needs, and was prone to several shortcomings, bugs and crashes.
eM Client is infinitely better than Thunderbird in my opinion and is completely free to those who have modest requirements. It is an excellent product warts and all and the best FREE client I have encountered so far. From personal experience I know that no software product is perfect, bug-free or without scope for improvement - as Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again!
I converted to eM about 14 months ago to V7 pro, having previously used Eudora for more years than I can remember and only gave up when it failed to support a lot of HTML stuff though I still have it installed - had a brief encounter with The Bat! and didn’t like it.
When I upgraded to V8 pro lifetime it was not straight forward, so deleted and did a clean install after modifying the install routine (I didn’t want it installed on C:// and there was no option at install so created one) since then I have had no real problems although I have re-written some code and created some work-a-rounds in calendar that corrected some things that didn’t work the way I wanted, apart from that it works perfectly for me and I have no complaints, I think it’s a great program.
I do have 2 issues so far not completely resolved:
1./ Attachments is OK as far as it goes but I have modified it to be more specific so that it now also groups attachments by to whom they were sent/received in folders.
2./ Rules are a nightmare, I have hundreds, which could be cut by 50% if ‘in’ & ‘out’ could be in the same rule (Eudora did this) I’m working on this with a work-a-round with the Rule options that are there; also I would like a wild facility (*@client.com) to capture emails from different individuals with the same client company.
That’s it, I’ll be pleased to hear from anybody that has any ideas.
If anybody is interested I’ve created a V8 Theme that suits me.
It’s available for download with information on colors etc at:
I 100% agree! Not only that, but the worse is the customer service we receive, or the lack of it, I should say.
Their stupid technicians always put the blame on us, our PC, our servers and this and that, and it’s NEVER eM’s fault, never! I’m sick and tired of their BS.
Asking for a refund as well and I’ll look at other clients. In the meantime, i’ll inundate internet with bad reviews.
Buenos!
Totally agree about the Rules wildcard feature, although Microsoft with all their vast resources isn’t able to provide the same with their Junk email filtering rules for outlook.live.com - and that’s where most of my spam originates. If they did I wouldn’t need eM Rules. But I can live with these minor limitations. Life’s too short to fret.
I’m sorry to hear that you have such a bad opinion of customer service, that has not been my experience, in fact on the few occasions I’ve contacted them they (a particular individual) have been very helpful with a point in the right direction.
I have to admit that I did consider reverting to V7, however, not to be beaten decided to continue with V8.
I’m glad that I did though in truth I have made several changes to the way that it operates that suit me but also accept that without in depth coding knowledge and capability it would be difficult for most to do the same.
With a little bit of knowledge some of the minor issues that people report can be solved with simple work-a-rounds; I view these things as a challenge.
Comments like ‘innundate the internet with bad reviews’ is not going to get you anywhere/win friends and influence people AND in my experience there has never been a program written that doesn’t have bugs.
If there is anything specific that you have an issue with I’l be happy to help you if I can.
Not using for years, but as fun experiment (is it still working) - sure.