Apple Mail vs emClient

Let’s face it, I live in the boonies. It hurts.

People in 3rd world countries have better Internet connections than I do, But I still geta LOT of mail. I’m subscribed to hundreds of mailing lists across multiple standards bodies like the IETF. And they get lots of messages.

I have about 1.5Mbps downstream bandwidth. So I’ve learned some tricks, For example. I have my email server filter mailin-list messages (using procmail or GMail filters or the like) into a folder tree. And I only look in one of those folders when it’s needful.

Historically, Apple’s Mac mail app allowd me to pick and choose which folders I wanted to download for “offline” use, an I told it to leave all those occasional-use folders on the server for me. Some relatively recent release changed that, and the Mac started synchronizing every message and every attachment down to local storage. Guess that’s why I needed a 512GB SSD, which was the biggest they had at the time.

But the real problem is that my incomimg mail rate actually started exceeding 1.5Mps – so I was sitting here with 100% network utilization and couldn’t even download all my mail. That cost a few thousand dollars in consulting fees last week, and I said … Well, I said harsh words.

The Quest

Mozilla Thunderbird still has indiivdual folder selection, but its contact list integration is weak and calendarding gets all weird (I have like 14 email accounts to keep straight and dozens of calendars), so I looked for alternatives.

And I really don’t like webmail on a 1.5Mbps connection; it’s like watching paint die of old age.

I found eM Client, which is a delightfully crisp multiplatform email client that understands Google’s OAuth and integrates contact and calendar managment, allows selection of folders for offline use, and mostly works. I had one contact refuse to sync from one of my Google accounts, but it didn’t tell me WHICH contact. I fixed hat the hard way by exporting all the contacts in that account from GMail, deleting them, then importing them into eM Client, copying them back to the account, and then fixing the dozen or garbled contacts so out of a thouosand or so that got imported. I’ve also had some glitches with contact uploads to Zoho’s carddav getting stuck.

I’ll probably even send them $50 for it.

Update: No, I didn’t send them $50. They license by the device, not the user. I have a bunch of devices. It’s $188.95 for 10 devices. I have more than that – “contact sales”. and I don’t want to mess with tracking the licenses.

Good news – plain old Thunderbird has the same feature, and the calendarding and other stuff now work well enough to use. And it has classic freeware licensing; donations requested.