Add eM Client to the mobile mail clients section

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1

eM Client for mobile (Android and iOS) has been released recently. Do you consider adding it to the iOS mail client section?

2

A priori to anything else, it just doesn’t meet the criteria for email clients.

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3

It meets the requirements just as much as CanaryMail while being more cross-platform:

  • It collects no more telemetry than CanaryMail, possibly less (the appstore label says it collects none, the privacy policies are similar).
  • It supports OpenPGP natively
  • It’s cross-platform across iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac.

I’ve used their desktop client for years and can confirm that it has never phoned home other than the occasional license and update check. When I blocked all connections from it except IMAP it worked for about two weeks before it said the license needed to be renewed, but never otherwise complained…

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4

The privacy policy doesn’t seem all that great

2. COLLECTING YOUR PERSONAL DATA

We collect information about you in the following ways:
Information You Give Us. This includes:

  • the personal data that may be contained in any video, comment or other submissions you upload or post to the Services;
    […]
  • the unique identifier calculated from your hardware configuration we use for validating of your license once you activate some of the Application
    […]

6. USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA

[…]

  • to link or combine user information with other personal data;

It is pretty clear to me they want to gather data to personally identify you in as many way as possible.

Im not sure I see a privacy benefit from using this and if you accidentlly consent to any of their other cookies, you will be opening yourself up to a ton of data going to them and third parties.

5

The “services” referenced there are their online forum and community, not your email activity. As they say elsewhere in the policy:

eM Client is a desktop application and allows users to set up accounts to online services such as G Suite, iCloud, Office365 and other services. For its operation, it needs to cache some of this data on the local computer. However, the Company never retrieves and has no access to this data. This includes account data, passwords, e-mails, calendars, tasks, notes, contacts and chat messages. The Company will never access this data for any purposes. All the information we receive from you is listed in the previous paragraph.

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7
  • For clients developed for open-source OSes (which last I checked, Android is), the client should also be open source – eM is not open source on Android. It also doesn’t have a Linux client
  • CanaryMail is only recommended because there are very few options for iOS, so not the best comparison (unless you want to suggest removing Canary too lol)
  • There is already a good cross-platform recommendation for Windows, macOS, Linux, and technically Android if you count K9 – Thunderbird.

What makes eM client better than canary (already accepted as an option) or even Thunderbird? Even if you argue it meets the minimum reqs and some of the best case, it definitely doesn’t fully meet the best case

8

Right, I meant it should be considered as a recommendation for iOS. Thunderbird is a better option, privacy-wise, on the platforms where it’s available (though I bounced off of it due to its UI).

It may be a better option than Canary since it may be more privacy respecting (or at least equivalent) and is more cross-platform for those that want to use it across more than one platform.

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