this is only my second time troubleshooting eM Client. But after a couple of hours looking through forums, which all seem to be about people having nothing but problems with it and no reasonable solutions, for a program that seems to be very poorly optimized and supported. I have to ask “why do people use it?”
Here’s a place to start:
Alternative to Outlook on Windows PC reviewed: eM Client (techhq.com)
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I use eM Client due to I find online web based mailer gui’s very limited compared to a custom built all in one mail client particularly when you are dealing with multiple email accounts and calendars, tasks, notes etc.
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I don’t use eMClient. I literally just unisntalled it a few minutes ago. I’ve returned to Outlook despite it not having key features I’m looking for (and still looking for).
The state of email clients on Windows is just downright atrocious. I have taken for granted the rich set of features the default mail app on Mac has had for years. In December I decided to go to Windows and leave the Mac. Due to the Adobe tools I use, I have two choices, Windows or Mac.
Over the last month I have used eMClient, Mailbird, The Bat, Postbox, Mail (included with Windows), Outlook, and I forget what else. I installed Thunderbird, but don’t care for the UI though I will try that one next.
Here’s what the Mac mail app provided: Unified inbox, rich set of filtering rules possible, virtual folders with a good set of options to control what appears in them, efficient gmail (business) integration, ability to handle multiple mailboxes with 10+ gb and hundreds of thousands of messages, very fast and efficient search across folders (or within single folder), highly responsive interactive UI on 9 year old hardware. That’s what I left.
I’m now on a Dell XPS 17 with 64 gb memory and integrated SSD. It’s newer and much faster than the 9 year old Mac mini it replaced.
Some clients do not provide unified inbox, others don’t provide virtual folders, still others have problems with large mailboxes and/or don’t integrate well (as in efficiently) with gmail. Some filters don’t work, others work but take a LONG time to do what should be simple operations. Most surprisingly have issues working well with large mailboxes.
It is really surprising to me to find such a disparity between email clients on Windows. I’m not looking for a free email client, I’m looking for a robust client of the same caliber as the Mac client. I’m more than willing to pay for it. Yet I don’t think it exists.
When I decided to jump ship and go to Windows I researched all the software I needed. I found viable replacements for everything. I assumed I’d use Outlook for email. I took it for granted. I spent my hardware budget on a new laptop, monitor, etc., and am very pleased with it. It works great and I like the quality of the hardware. I did not anticipate the email issues.
If you find a worthy email client I’d love to hear about it. Of the ones I used, eMClient was among the better ones. It mostly worked, albeit some bad design issues (imho) and some performance issues with gmail (business) mailboxes. If it weren’t for my gmail requirement I’d probably use eMClient myself. I’ll probably download and give eMClient another go after another release or two. We’ll see.
Greg
@gsy There is a brand new 8.2 Mac Beta out that you might like to try with new features.
eM Client 8.2 for macOS BETA is out!
Or the latest 8.2 version for Windows u can also download to try from the ver history page.
https://www.emclient.com/release-history
eM Client is worthy. It has:
- Unified inbox - Yes
- rich set of filtering rules possible - Yes
- virtual folders with a good set of options to control what appears in them - Yes
- efficient gmail (business) integration - Yes
- ability to handle multiple mailboxes with 10+ gb and hundreds of thousands of messages - Yes
- very fast and efficient search across folders (or within single folder) - Yes
- highly responsive interactive UI - Yes
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I think it’s more likely that users use forums to report problems and look for solutions than to report how happy they are with their hassle-free software.
I don’t think so. There is a long history of releases with added features and fixed bugs. You can get free support in this forum or open a ticket if you have a pro licence. Not so bad.
To answer your question, I use eM Client because it’s well designed, easy to use, and has some features that I would miss in other clients, most of all excellent integration of CalDAV and CardDAV.
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Hi Gary,
Yes, eMClient does check many of those boxes. My experience with eMClient is in another thread I believe.
To use your summary, I’ll add my comments
- Unified Inbox - yes, it does
- Rich set of filter rules possible - Yes and No
- for the most part, there were a couple of options that were missing, and the modal rule editor was a royal pain to use, but by exporting the rules as XML, editing the XML, and reimporting them I was able to quickly build the rules I needed with much less aggrevation than using the rule editor window.
- Filters are no good if they don’t actually apply. I created a rule, then chose to apply it from the rules editor, it never finishes. Left it running for 24 hours and it didn’t finish. Supposedly only 600 messages in the inbox at that time.
- Virtual folders with good set of options to control what appears in them - I would have to reinstall eMC to remind myself, but the virtual folder did not do something I was looking for. I don’t remember what it was. I’ll leave this one as a maybe or yes since I can’t remember.
- efficient gmail - Aboslutely positively NOT
- I believe eMC requires and sync the All Mail folder from gmail. My work mailbox has over 120,000 messages and takes up a little over 11 gb.
- configured to download all messages including attachments. no reason to connect back to the server once the message is downloaded, yet switching between threads would some time take several seconds per thread change
- any time it had to check for new messages or scan folders it would take minutes to complete
- no - gmail is NOT efficient
- for comparison, my other mail folder, with over 12 gb of messages and about 150,000 messages worked perfectly. It’s not gmail, it’s a real imap service. so the issue seems to be specific to the gmail interface for eMC
- multiple inboxes over 10 gb - sort of
- works fine for regular imap
- not so good for gmail over 10 gb
- very fast and efficient search - sort of
- it sort of worked, but it was prone to get sluggish, not sure if that was because it was trying to sync some thigns from gmail or something else. I left the client running for 4 days to give it time to download/sync/index everything.
- i did not test this as thoroughly as I would have liked, the other issues were a big problem, but when I was looking for a message for work it was not finding it, and I had to jump over to the Mac in order to find the message.
- highly responsive interactive UI - sorry, I disagree
- I’m on a 6 month old XPS 17, 64 gb ram, SSD and comparing to a 9 year old Mac mini, the Dell is 6 cores, the Mac has 4. The eMC UI is sluggish. Sadly not a scientific comparison. The Mac and the Dell have the same 3 mailboxes active, has the same download everything settings, yet the Mac is nearly instantaneous when it comes to switch messages, threads, or even folders. eMC is fast and responsive when you stay with one thread or one message, but switching folders or changing threads it’s like it has to reload a bunch of stuff, or it’s going to the server for some reason, it just pauses, catches up, and then displays it.
I’m probably going to download it and try again. Maybe a fresh install and letting it run over the weekend will reset something and yield better results.
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Hi Gary,
I decided to download and try eMClient again, just to be sure about my earlier assessment and comments.
This time I set up everything manually, instead of importing settings from Outlook. I also only set up gmail. I was trying to give it the best possible chance of doing things well from the beginning. Note when I uninstalled it I also deleted the AppData folder so none of the old version remained. If any registry entries remained I can’t say, I didn’t look that deep. If they did, then that’s their uninstaller’s fault for not removing them.
It’s now 16 hours later and counting, syncing All Mail the entire time. And by my calculations it’s maybe 10% done. The progress bar in Operations doesn’t even have an orange block indicating any progress at all (dark theme this time).
Hardly an efficient gmail interface. Looking at the network monitor it’s just sipping at bandwidth. I don’t know what it’s problem is. I’m using webmail so I can work and leave eMC running to finish its initial sync. I’m hoping letting it run to completion over the weekend (hopefully it’ll finish by Monday) will get everything set up in as optimal conditions as it can so maybe it is only the initial sync that is painfully slow. So far, though the second impression is just as bad as the first.
Again, this applies to large mailboxes. Smaller mailboxes with fewer folders and messages may be a completely different story. I don’t know. But it does not bode well for future users if that’s the case, one day the mailbox could cross some size threshold and then everything bog down like it is for me.
Just thought I’d share my experience so far.
Thanks,
Greg
i can see the benefit to having all the features that Gary listed would be a good thing, but if they can’t make it user friendly and fully functional, then whats the point.
my worst impression comes from a comment on a thread about the timeout issues, a customer asked why they hadn’t put in a setting to change the length of time outs for server connections, after people had been asking for it since 2013 and the actual response from someone at eM Client was “its long enough for most people”. this was the only response no follow up no actual explanation. If this is the level of effort they put in, they should not expect many people to use it.
From personally working at ISP tech support for years, timeout settings were mainly used when you had eg: slow dialup connections (which there wouldn’t be too many left in the world now). With modern broadband (even mobile data connections) time out settings are really not warranted any longer.
I’ve personally been using every version of eM Client from V6-8.2 for Windows and recently Mac, and never had to worry about adjusting timeout settings. If you are getting timeout issues, either you have a problem with your physical connection & need to talk to your ISP tech support, or if that’s ok, then you have a program installed delaying your incoming email causing the time outs like eg: Antivirus email scanning, or Internet Security / Firewall programs interfering with the incoming mail ports etc.
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Posting a follow-up for any that might be curious.
It took eMC between 36 and 40 hours by my estimate to finally sync All Mail on my gmail account. Now that is done, it appears to be working better than my previous tests a couple of weeks ago.
There are still some major issues though.
I have it set to download everything including attachments. Yet when I switch to an unread thread, I get the animation at the top of the message preview pane showing that it’s going to the server to get the message bodies. This should not be happening. If it did not download message bodies why on earth did it take 36+ hours to sync the all mail folder from gmail? It doesn’t add up.
Finally, this time the rules processing is working MUCH better. I still have all my gripes about how paniful it is to edit rules and such, but at least this time the rules actually applied to completion. And another evidence of it NOT downloading message bodies despite the config option - some of the filters I need require looking in the message body for certain strings. Those filters are applying, but MUCH more slowly than I’d expect UNLESS it’s downloading bodies to check. So further evidence it did not download the message body like it should have. For comparison, last test I ran several rules (both checking message body and not), and it would frequently hang. I left it once for over 24 hours and it made no progress. Now it is chewing thru 10 messages in 38 seconds. At this rate it will take over an hour to process the 998 messages in the inbox.
The best news of all, however, is that this time it IS properly removing the Inbox tags from messages it is moving to other folders. In the previous test message would be flagged as both Inbox and the destination folder. Gmail evidently does not use folders, rather it uses tags and exposes them as folders on imap. Moving a message to a new folder means it gets tagged with the folder and the Inbox tag should be removed. The previous test was not doing that second step. This time, it appears to be removing the Inbox tag so the inbox is actually getting cleaned up when the rules are applied. This is very good news.
So there is progress and improvements over the previous experience I had a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know if the problems were from importing settings or what, because I believe I had this same version, or I had updated to it while testing.
It still has a lot of All Mail syncs. And typically when it is syncing like that, it may or may not report new messages as they arrive.
Also, the rules options are pretty good, but one key action is missing, the ability to give a specific notification or alert. For example, if you get a critical message (equivalent to getting paged), it would be nice to play a different notification sound and/or pop up a special notification advising that this message has arrived.
I haven’t made it to testing virtual folders again, yet, but that’s getting close.
It’s better than the last test, which is good at least, but if it’s always going back to the server for the message bodies then it’s never going to be truly responsive. And if you’re offline, you won’t be able to do anything with the messages supposedly downloaded already.
I guess we’ll see how the next few days go…
Greg
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Thanks cyberzork - but I’m on Windows. The issue is I’m coming from the mac and the mac’s mail app worked very well for me and has set the bar rather high for what i expect in modern email clients. Sure it had the occasional hiccup, but those were rare. It, seemingly effortlessly, handled 20-30 gb of mail and a few hundred thousand messages, kept them organized, folders synced, and I could find messages going back decades almost instantaneously when searching. [One mailbox had messages going back to the early 90s until I cleared some of the oldest ones out due to space constraints when the mailbox started getting close to my then 10 gb limit.]
@gsy Ok I also use the Windows version of EMC.
Gmail evidently does not use folders, rather it uses tags and exposes them as folders on imap
Yes Gmail just uses “Labels” and not folders as you mentioned.
The ‘All Mail’ folder in Gmail is where Gmail keeps all of its emails and labels are applied to show emails in various folders including the Inbox. So the ‘All Mail’ label is really an archive folder in Gmail.
I have it set to download everything including attachments. Yet when I switch to an unread thread, I get the animation at the top of the message preview pane showing that it’s going to the server to get the message bodies.
From my own experience using Gmail and other IMAP accounts in eM Client, once initially sync is complete, (even setting the program to download everything) it still does a “quick check” for new messages or changes in all mail folder & any labels etc before or after downloading new mail.
I don’t think it’s a bug, and is just the way the program has been designed for IMAP account’s.
@cyberzork i think the gmail faked imap and eMC’s method of integrating with it is what I’m up against. I just posted a new thread with the 3 main issues I’m encountering.
The quick check is normal, but the issue is here that check is anything but quick so far. However it’s still downloading messages (36-40 hours for All Mail to sync, now another 30ish hours of downloading messages and it’s only about half way).
How big is your gmail account? It might be an issue only with large mailboxes over a certain size or over a certain number of messages that is the problem.
There’s definitely something not right here. See my new thread for the details (or the TLDR summary at the top) 
Greg
@gsy My Gmail mailbox size was 12gb which from memory took around 48hrs to completely sync all mail and labels etc. Once it was all cached, it now all seems to work fine.
I have a Gmail and a Live account both IMAP with around 80 labels under each account with no (sub labels under them).
EM Client only generally takes around 10-15secs to check for any changes in both accounts. If it’s taking alot longer than that, I suspect it’s not 100% synced everything as yet. Maybe you have alot more labels / sub labels in your Gmail mailbox so EMC is taking longer till all completed.
Click on Gmail “All mail folder” and click “Refresh” at the top left of eM Client and then click “Show Operations” via the dropdown arrow (on the right of refresh) and see if All mail is still synchronizing. If it’s still synchronizing the All mail folder, then you just have to let it completely finish. I still could use eM Client no problem while it was initially synchronizing All Mail & Labels.
Note:- For me personally the same thing happened when i initially setup Thunderbird years ago before moving to eM Client. Thunderbird took around 2 days to completely sync my Gmail as well.
I’ve been using eMC for quite a few months now after trying pretty much anything. What I’d love to see improving: LABELS!
I’d like to be able to type labels directly into the email just like Gmail does. And it would be great if labels could be nested (I built a huge label list). Last but not least I would like to be able to scroll with the mouse wheel the labels list. Using AI to suggest labels whenever you get or send an email would be awesome too.
@cyberzork thanks for the info.
So it seems there are multiple steps. step 1 is an initial sync of folders and some messages, step 2 is a full sync of message headers, and step 3 is a full download of messages. At least that’s what seems to be happening. I believe I am now in day 5 of the process, and it is almost finished with step 3. The operations window says “Downloading messages” now instead of synchronizing All Mail.
One big issue remains, but i’ll wait for the full download to finish before making a final decision about eMC.
That issue is keeping the server up to date with changes. Right now eMC applies rules and messages in eMC appear to be put in the right folders, now the Inbox label seems to be reliably removed from moved messages, but those changes are not synced back up to the imap server. This means my phone is all those filtered messages still in the inbox.
If eMC is not syncing changes back up to the server, then it’s little more than POP at that point. Not good.
I’ll wait for the entire initial download/sync etc. to finish before doing my final tests and making final determination.
Thanks for the pointers on this.
BTW, I have been watching the operations window since last week when I started this process.
Other mail clients, and I think even Mail.app (Mac) also generally take about 1-2 days to do their initial sync as well. That’s why I have been surprised by how slow this is going.
Greg
And it would be great if labels could be nested (I built a huge label list)
You can right-click on eM Client labels under any account and create as many sub labels as you like.