Frequently Asked Questions

Go to Menu > Rules and a window with various options will appear, from where you can create and edit the rules.

Click '+New rule' and follow the Rule Wizard, it will guide you through the process.

Read more in the Documentation: Rules

Even if you use features like rules and customizable folders to sort your mail, it can still be difficult to find a specific email. While you can manually go through your folders, there’s a much easier way to quickly find what you're looking for - all you have to do is use the search feature.

The search bar is located in the upper right corner. You can use this bar to search for keywords in the title of an email, the body or the sender’s address. Type in the keyword, hit ‘Enter’ and a list of emails with that phrase will pop up.

Advanced search

For a slightly more advanced search, you can type a “?” in the search bar and a drop-down menu will appear. This can help you narrow down your search by specifying things like the location of the keywords, if the email has an attachment, if it was sent before or after a certain date and so on.
You can also click the downward pointing triangle at the end of the search bar to get a list of advanced options to further narrow down your search.
Select ‘Advanced Search’ for even more options.

Search Bar tips & tricks

•          If you don’t remember a certain part of your keyword, you can use the wildcard “*” to represent any character(s). For example, searching for “*ance” will turn up both “finance” and “fiancé”.
•          eM Client always searches as though there was a wildcard at the end of your keyword, so even if you don’t insert a “*” at the end, it will effectively still search for “keyword*”.
•          If you search for an email address, eM Client will give you a list of suggestions for completing the address based on who's in your contact list. Please be aware that @ isn’t treated as a separator, the whole address is therefore one text string. If you’re searching for a text inside the domain name, you need to use the wildcard: e.g. searching for ‘*emclient.com’ will turn up [email protected].
•          Please be aware that to search through the body of an email, full messages need to be downloaded. For IMAP this is not a default setting. Go to Menu > Accounts and enable downloading of messages for offline use under the IMAP tab.

Read more in our blog: Search keywords

eM Client supports export to all standard file types for all your items.

You can export emails into an email message format (.eml), calendars and tasks into iCalendar files (.ics) or your contacts into VCards (.vcf).

You can also export your account settings, rules, signatures, and other settings into a .xml file and import it into another instance of eM Client.

The export feature is accessible in Menu > File > Export.

Read more in the Documentation: Export

The special folders in Favorite folders collect messages from all accounts. If there are copies of the same message it can mean the message is copied into more folders or among more accounts.

Common causes for this include:

• Duplicate setup - make sure each of your accounts is set up only once in Menu > Accounts, or all messages will appear twice in Favorite folders
• Rules - do you have any rules that are meant to copy incoming messages? Check the Menu > Rules to make sure that there isn't a rule creating unwanted copies.
• Forwarding - do you perhaps have a server-side forwarding set for one of your accounts? If you don't want messages from one account to always be forwarded to another, check your server rules, for example through webmail

Note: In eM Client 6 this problem also sometimes happened with Gmail accounts, which keeps a copy of each message in All Mail folder and also created copies in Important and Starred labels.
Since eM Client creates a separate folder for each label, emails that have multiple labels attached to them will have multiple copies saved. The only workaround for that issue is to disable the showing of redundant labels like "Starred" and "Important" in IMAP. You can find this option by opening a web browser and logging in to Gmail. Click on Settings, and then go to the tab at the top called "Labels".

Since eM Client 7.0 we have adapted Gmail's internal structure. All messages have just one copy in the All Mail folder and other folders are just assigned labels.

We believe that Spam should be filtered directly on the server so eM Client includes only one default Spam rule that moves messages marked by SpamAssassin as spam to the Junk folder.

Besides this option, you can always blacklist an email address/domain by clicking the button "Move to Junk" and choosing the option "Move to Junk and blacklist email/domain". This Blacklist is then saved as a Rule in the Rules section.

You can view and manage the Blacklist rule in Menu > Rules. Just select the Blacklist and click the 'Edit' button.

A new window with all the domains and addresses in your blacklist will pop up and you can add new items or remove any of the email addresses and domains already in it.

If your server does not provide any spam filtering options, we can also recommend using an external Spam filtering program, like MailWasher, Spamihilator or others.

You can view and manage the Blacklist rule in Menu > Rules. Just select the Blacklist and click the 'Edit' button.

A new window with all the domains and addresses in your blacklist will pop up and you can add new items or remove any of the email addresses and domains already in it.

Unfortunately, the Outlook rules have their own specific structure which has no public technical documentation. Because of this, importing these rules is not a trivial feature that could be added to our program.

You can re-create your rules in Menu > Rules section, though.

Yes, you can definitely use a number of startup parameters.

Here is a short overview:

    /dblocation PATH

    This parameter will determine which folder will eM Client load the main database from. If the given folder does not exist, eM Client will create the folder and a new, empty database in it. Without this parameter, eM Client will load the database from the currently set default location.

    /localmutex

   Use this parameter when deploying the application in a Remote Desktop Services or Terminal Services environment where accessing global mutexes (short for „mutual exceptions“ in programming) is forbidden – the application will use local ones instead.

    /mailurl RECIPIENT

    Use this parameter to create a new message with a pre-defined email address compliant with RFC 6068.
Example: MailClient.exe /mailurl "mailto:[email protected]?subject=hello&body=bodytext"

    /open PATH

    With this parameter you can open any .eml, .msg, .vcf, or .ics file in eM Client.

    /newmail

    This parameter will open a window to compose a new mail.

    /newcontact

    This parameter will open a window to create a new contact.

    /newevent

    This parameter will open a window to plan an event.

    /newtask

    This parameter will open a window to create a new task.

    /importsettings PATH [-s] [-p PASS]

    This parameter defines a file which contains eM Client settings and its password, which needs to be used to import the data. It needs to be an .XML file and can contain application settings, account configuration, templates, quicktexts, and rules. PATH is the location of the file. The rest of the parameter options are optional. [-s] stands for "silent" and means that the settings will be imported without opening the UI. [-p PASS] is for inserting the password, if there is one protecting the file.
Example: MailClient.exe /importsettings "c:\Temp\settings.xml" -s -p MyPassword

    /activate

    You can easily activate your eM Client using this parameter and activation key.

    This parameter can also be used without the Activation key, but for activation to be possible in this case eM Client needs to have a LastActivationKey entry in its database with a valid Activation key. Usually, the LastActivationKey value is set using the /importsettings parameter.

    /deactivate

    This parameter will deactivate the license in your device. This can be useful when you have a set number of seats on your license and want to quickly free up the space by deactivating the device you no longer plan to use.

Note: This answer applies only to Windows version.

Read more in the Documentation: Startup Parameters

You can set up and manage some of the rules directly on the server for Exchange, Gmail and IceWarp accounts.

Next to the 'New rule' button in the Rule window toolbar you can now select from Local rules and your accounts' specific server rules.

When the rules are on the server instead of just in eM Client they will be applied to new messages, even when eM Client isn't running. And if you use eM Client on numerous devices, you don't need to set up or copy the rule to each device separately.

When creating a custom rule in Menu>Rules you might have tried to use a condition to find specific word in a mail header.

Trying to add a single word will produce the error: Header words must be specified as "Name: Value" pair.

This is because emails have a numerous mail headers which contain specific information - these include From: or Sender: for original sender of the message, Date:, Received: information, etc. If you're creating your rule based on a specific message, you can check the actual headers by right-clicking inside the email > Open Mail Header... and find which header name your word is in.

Then just use both the header name and the word in the format Name: Value in the rule, for example From: John will affect all messages where 'John' is part of the visible name or email address of the sender.