EM Client, what are you going to do about this?
People have been complaining about this ever since V7 was made available for general testing so don’t hold your breath for a resolution.
It seems like somebody has decided that this ridiculous UI “feature” is a good thing and they aren’t going to recant. Hope I’m proven wrong.
It appears they have no interest or intention of fixing this obnoxiously ineffective scroll bar any time in the near future. I am re-installing V6 because the new features of V7 are not worth the annoyance of the tiny scroll bar. Keep in mind that V6 is still available on their web site.
I am using eM Client V6 for about 4 years. Before I was using Outlook and Thunderbird, but was dissapointed with changes in new versions, therefore I was looking for some good alternative and found eM Client if I can remember in version 5 maybe. Every next update makes it even better and better. After theese years of using it I can say it is the best email client on the net. So I was courious about new V7. I install it on my new laptop with Win8.1. First I was dissapointed with that new UI, but I was thinking, that I can change some setting to make it better. After that I found that there aro no such settings (to make program menus visible like in V6, to change scroll bars, …). Then I found somethng called “Themes” in settings tab, but in reality it changes only colors of UI not UI itself. After some days of using of this V7 i found it very painfull to me, so I am definitely downgrading back to V6, which is really the best email client on the net. I will be still looking forward for updates and new versions.
I have to say, I am pretty surpised that there has been no response from anyone at EMCLIENT to this thread recently. I would have thought just a ‘we are looking into this’ type of reply in this thread would at least put everyone’s mind at ease that maybe the scrollbars will become usable again soon. A little forum interaction would at least indicate that someone is listening and watching and we are not just venting our frustrations to each other! But not to post anything gives you the impression that maybe they won’t do anything. If that is the case, we (I mean the company I work for) will need to look for other alternatives as the person within our business that I have spoken of just finds the software unusable with the scroll bars as they are.
I wonder why it would be necessary to grab a scrollbar regularly with the mouse anyway. What are scrollwheels made for?
A good solution that might help most people could be to make the grip-area wider (since space is reserved anyway) without making the visual scrollbar wider. Though instead of only getting darker on mouseover it could also get its full width. The visibility without mouseover could be enhanced individually with a theme.
Enhanced visibility would help, and a scrollwheel means a scrollbar is not is not technically necessary.
But doing away with it fails to engage the ergonomics of Windows users who have been hitting them with their mouse pointers for many, many years.
If the objective is a cleaner design, they could do what IE11 does - the scroll bar hides after a while and comes back when you mouse over the area. I find it annoying, but at least it is functional, which is more than eM Client v7 is now.
There are times when you need more precise control than you can get with a scroll wheel, and that’s what the top and bottom arrows are good for. And as for any claim that the mouse wheel is adequate, it is simply insufficient when the scroll is very long, because it takes way too long to scroll a long way with the mouse wheel.
One of the other functions of a scroll bar is to indicate visually that there is more content than shown. But to do this the scroll bar must be visible, not hidden (as in IE11) and not a thin line that can easily be mistaken as a border (as in Em Client v7). When the content is very long, the thin scroll bar is so short (as it should be) that even when i’m looking for it i can’t find it without visually searching.
Since the official rep apparently walked away from this four months ago maybe we all (particularly us paying users) ought to submit support tickets to get someone’s attention.
I experimented with changing the default theme. I don’t care for the color but Bordeaux has a much higher contrast ratio and I at least I can see the bloody thing now.
I’ve already queried support myself. Their response was that I could edit hex codes and change the colors. Seriously? For everyday users?
Contrast helps but still doesn’t fix the problem, though.
It’s a shame that eM Client is the only app that I can find that will seamlessly link to a Gmail account and sync emails, contacts and calendar. If I could find something else I’d jump ship because these guys are increasingly looking like a bunch of amateurs.
No, not amateurs, but innovators and perhaps overly idealistic. There is still no better non-cloud email client than eM Client. The pathetic runner up is Thunderbird. Microsoft has moved to cloud apps. eM Client is one of the best pieces of consumer software i’ve seen, so be gentle on its rather few flaws.
Part of the problems for desktop users have their origins in this software being made more functional on portable devices, and this is happening everywhere. Thus the menu now takes less space, but one more step to use. However, the idealistic notion that scroll bars no longer have any function - based presumably in people’s growing lack of familiarity with desktops and there thinking that swiping is good enough - is a clear usability problem and shows a lack of experience in building cross-platofrm apps.
Both desktop computers and mobile devices are here to stay and both will continue to constitute very large user bases, so i think it behooves eM Client to take desktop seriously and get it right … referring especially to the dysfunctional scroll bars in v7. They are just not thinking straight on this one.
I get 1 reply from an official rep soon after me starting the thread 4 months ago, only to say that they can’t duplicate the issue, wtf?, and then silence.
That is what I was referring to when I labelled them amateurs. I agree, the software is quite good.
They cannot duplicate the 5-pixel wide super narrow scroll bar? … lol 
I guess that would be code for they don’t see why it’s a problem.
I would be curious to know stats on enterprise uses of touchscreen workstations. I suspect that most of that environment is probably still using mice.
eM client IS pretty decent software but this strikes me as the same error (fortunately not as extreme) that Microsoft made with Windows 8: letting engineers design stuff for the gee whiz latest mobile environment and ignoring a broad desktop user base. It’s possible to satisfy both.
An astute observation that eM Client fell into the same trap as Windows … like the start screen fiasco
I would guess that touchscreen workstations are almost non-existant. I’ve actually considered the possiblity, but ran into two problems : 1) there is a shortage of good touchscreens, and 2) using a touchscreen in the vertical position is an arm killer, and using it flat is a neck killer.
Why the combined genius of Microsoft couldn’t work that out in about 3 seconds is beyond me.
I have uninstalled V7 (and reinstalled V6 because of the scroll issue) and in the uninstallation they bring up a comment page which I issued our complaint on… maybe they will read that because they don’t seem to read the blog comments
Thanks for that, Larry B.
We certainly welcome your feedback on the issue. One of the goals of version 7 was to clean up the cluttered user interface and to improve usability on touch devices and high DPI displays, which are increasingly getting more prevalent. At the time of beta testing the issue of scrollbars came to our attention, but it wasn’t a major one since many of the common scenarios were covered by using mouse wheels (or touch pad gestures for laptop owners) and only in minority of the cases the scrollbar was actually being used.
There’s actual reason on why the scrollbar is narrow. It is directly related to the decision we took to automatically hide the scrollbar. Early in the development we experimented with different scrollbar types, sizes and fading effects. What become apparent was that the content mustn’t move when the scrollbar is displayed or hidden because it would result in very distracting effect. A side effect of this is that the content will be still exactly on the same place whether you expand a large folder tree on the left side, open a huge mailbox or whether you have a short or long mail in the preview pane.
This lead to another observation. The padding on the right edge must be big enough to accommodate for space between content and the scrollbar and the scrollbar itself. At the same time it can’t be too big because it results in very uneven look when the scrollbar is hidden. The content wouldn’t extend to the right edge and it looks like a bug.
One way we found address this problem was to make the actual area responding to the mouse slightly bigger than the actually displayed size of the scrollbar. I’m not sure whether this change made it into the released version or not, but we are constantly working on improving the user experience and plan on releasing small updates to fix the issues like this.