eM Client Reviews

Good I helped one of my fellow retirees and installed the free version she loves it. She had the same complaint I had about Microsoft and the up sale problems.

They don't keep trying to sell me more stuff. I find a lot of the software suppliers try and up sell different products after you purchase something from them.

Nothing so far I haven't found anything that doesn't work.

Really good, fast, smooth, syncs well with every mail account that I've tried. Really pleased with it.

Handles large volumes of emails.
Syncs with Google properly (not like Outlook).
Nice interface with good customisation.

When create a new folder, the software automatically selects it - pretty pointless as I've only just created it so it's empty!! Be good if you could stop this.
Slightly over-priced.
Would like the ability to have a single inbox for "Favourite" accounts.
Better MS Exchange functionality (especially for older exchange servers).

The product is great for end users at home but I see no reason why an end user would choose this over anything that is available for free that is typically more solid when it comes to possible data corruptions. This program would, however, be of great use to companies which need connectivity to exchange and do not want to deal with MS products. However, for those this program cannot be used due to deployment issues - no GPO deployment support of the MSI, no way to do unattended activation and setup default options, incorrect default placement of data directory, way too frequent database corruption. My rating thus reflects the usability to companies - there is none and this product either should change their philosophy or the developers should find a different job.

The product, once setup and running is smooth with clean interface and high usability. From my test users the feedback was largely positive regarding their use experience.

The product is not mature enough for enterprises. It lacks deployment options and has to be manually installed and activated on each workstation. While they provide MSI package, the package is incompatible with e.g. GPO deployment or any other deployment setup that makes use of the SYSTEM account to execute the msiexec. They are likely trying to write to one of the directories where the SYSTEM account does not have access.

Second, it is impossible to active the software in an unattended fashion. Activation requires the administrator to run the exe file of the application with a switch providing there the key. This cannot be well scripted and integrated into the deployment flow.

Third, as a default option the program saves all offline emails into the roaming portion of the user folder and you have to change it manually prior to making the software available to users. Again this requires manual interaction of the administrator with each workstation.

Next, if the database is corrupted, which happens quite often compared to outlook (during 3 months of testing, the database got corrupted 4 times and had to be completely removed and eM client setup afresh), the user has to manually delete it and set everything up again. They do not have setting separated from data so that settings of the user can be kept in the roaming folder and data in the local folder. So once the database goes, all goes.

The user has to setup his or her email, unlike in outlook which can take the data from the windows login.

The support is poor and has little to no understanding of active directory environments and so is the story with the developers. Unwilling to admit that the default placement of database in the roaming folder is not great or that simply doing some basic settings would be better if it could be implemented eg. via options to the MSI or MSI transforms. They do not offer any GPO policies or any other way to manage the product (which e.g. Thunderbird has).