Xobni-Like functions

Upon installing the new version of eMclient, I immediately noticed the additional contact information and statistics on the right-hand side of the screen. It looks very intuitive, very informative and gives you some viable information about the people that you’re contacting our regular basis. This was very similar to the functionality people have been saying with XOBNI for Microsoft Outlook, but it’s not as advanced; given some more time I think is really going to be good. eMclient crew has really placed themselves ahead of the curve by providing the XOBNI-like interface with their base product- which nobody else is doing.

Google integration

eMclient has been advertising for some time that it can synchronize with Google e-mail [Gmail], contacts, calendar and GoogleTalk.

One of the very first things I was looking for was the program’s ability to synchronize contacts to Gmail. Immediately after installing the program, I went directly into the process or trying to import my contacts from Gmail; the program failed and produced a ubiquitous error message, ‘error occurred during import process’.

Obviously this was the case, but it didn’t provide any information as to why the error occurred or how to correct the problem what direction I should look to try to fix the issue. this is a serious credibility breaker for me.

Information layout

Another issue seemed to be the display of certain pieces of information on the main form. eMclient makes a valiant effort to try to be intuitive, but I think there’s a limitation in that process and the price of that results in some skittish results.

The example here shows that the calendar information is too crowded to show the viable information in the background. The program is trying to be intuitive by automatically expanding and contracting the spaces but I don’t think it’s handling the real estate of the information properly, yet.

Contact management

I think one of the good signs of a good e-mail client is the development of the contact manager. Essentially that’s what you’re doing, you’re trying to create a contact platform where you can store all your friends and family with their contact information such as e-mail, address and phone number [etc]. Any need to be able to access this information fluidly. It should be easy to access, easy to copy and easy to export for other purposes [holiday mailing lists].

eMclient has done a great job thus far in trying to create a really good contact manager, my opinion is that they haven’t quite reached the goal line.

I make this comment because you can’t easily place the mouse over the context and right-click and choose copy, you can’t right-click on the user’s e-mail address and choose copy and since the program accessed information from Facebook I just assumed that he would store some information about their Facebook account to be able to contact them that way, but it doesn’t.

Import from third parties

I really love the fact that they can import contacts from Facebook, and that they attempt to import contacts from Gmail [I really like these types of features]. Although my attempts to import my Gmail contacts didn’t work, my attempt to import my Facebook contacts worked just fine. Oddly enough the program imported all my contacts from Facebook but I have no way of contacting them because there’s no e-mail address associated with some of their profiles; it just seems odd.

Importing information; the inner workings of the program itself still seems to have some refinements that need to be made. When choosing the option to import information into the program, he doesn’t always seem entirely clear exactly how the process is going to work and you feel like you’re trying to fumble through the program opened that you’re going get the right results.

Instant messaging

I would really like to see the integration of eMclient with something like Pidgin Instant Messenger. The reason I say this is because so many people have different types of e-mail accounts. There’s Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, ICQ and so many other different types of web hosted e-mail accounts, not just jabber [which is built into eMclient].

Having the ability to interact with different instant messaging systems/protocols you’d be able to connect with your friends and family so much faster; it would be an awesome addition.

eMclient does offer the ability to integrate with Skype, but again having the ability to interface with other Instant Messenger systems/protocols is still a highly desirable function.

Google Tasks

eMclient really has tried integrate everything else that Google offers as far as web services. I’m not completely disappointed that Google tasks is not in the program yet; it’s fairly new, but it’s a highly sought after feature with a lot of users. I’m sure this is something that’s on the eMclient’s programming staffs to do list. So this is something that I think I’ll be looking forward to the future.

Generalized errors

With as many services as eMclient is trying to integrate into their application I was really surprised to see as many air messages as I was getting during just the setup phase of using the application.

I kept getting continuous ‘sub folder synchronization…’ errors. I got them on startup and I got the repetitively the longer the application was open. The programmers really need to look into trying to eliminate this particular problem because it really stifles the credibility of the application. Getting errors ever five minutes doesn’t instill confidence.

So, in this section I think that we need some more improvements to try to identify and eliminate these types of messages/errors.

eMclient Support options

The eMclient website has options for support in the form of FAQs, bug tracking, how to work with Gmail and several videos, but one of the things that I think is really missing from eMclient is the lack of a discussion forum; driven by their users. My experience is that users like to discuss how they are using the program, how they fixed certain issues and it also serves for active debate on new features should be added to the program.

Once established, I think it would serve for a great knowledgebase and all the users for eMclient could benefit from it.