Ongoing reporting:

I am interested enough in eMclient that I've actually purchased it.

I have purchased eMclient not because it is particularly good for speech control, but because eMclient has better support for Gmail labels than most email programs. IMHO eMclient beats Gmail itself because eMclient knows how to sort messages, and IMHO sorting with grouping is rather like ad hoc tagging, and/or replaces umpteen separate search commands. unlike Outlook and Thunderbird, and most other IMAP based email programs, eMclient can do better than the usual crappy mapping of Gmail labels to IMAP folders. EMclient can display all of the Gmail labels/tags that a message possesses. There's a Thunderbird plug-in that does the same, but that is really just an afterthought and not properly editable.

Unfortunately, I continue to suffer the 6 to 15 second stall whenever I try to apply Gmail tags in eMclient. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for me to purchase eMclient was to get "VIP support", supposedly giving them logs so they can diagnose the problems. Cross my fingers, hope for the best.

In the meantime, I am applying tags by copying/moving messages to folders/labels/tags. but at least the tags appear on the message after being copied or moved to folders. Unfortunately there can be considerable delay.

Unfortunately^2, I am running into quite a few problems with eMclient where the recommendation is "remove your account then add back", and occasionally "uninstall then reinstall eMclient". and/or "repair your account". unfortunately^3, there is considerable work involved in customizing favorites etc., and backing up and then restoring the configuration often restores the problem that had you uninstall/remove/...

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as I say above, my motivation for purchasing eMclient is mainly to get the Gmail labels support. It is NOT" because eMclient is friendly to speech control, in fact quite the opposite.

EMclient has some of the least complete keyboard control of any app that I have recently encountered. There are many things that you just cannot do by keyboard shortcuts, which are therefore harder to automate In speech commands.

Worse, the dialog boxes and pickers that eMclient uses for folders and tags are ... awkward for automation? e.g. I might want to have a command that removes one tag and then adds another. I will typically want these tags, Gmail labels, to be specified by paths, e.g. retention/keep and retention/deletable, or retention/keep-but-deletable. I want my script to be able to specify such a tag/label/folder path, and then press enter. unfortunately, the pickers are extremely history sensitive. And do not reliably respond to keyboard directions like {home} and {end} to go to known good positions and lists. therefore, I have not yet been able to safely select such a tag/label/folder path and then just apply it -- I nearly always need to get user confirmation, and quite often need to navigate using the mouse to select an item. Which rather defeats the purpose if I want to have one command manipulate to or more tags without user intervention.

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so I cannot be 100% happy about eMclient. it's just the best application I have so far found to interface to Gmail labels and still get sorting, but it really is not friendly for automation.

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yeah, unfortunately I have given up for the moment on using emacs/Gnus for Gmail. Long-term probably, once the oauth situation has settled down for open source applications and Gmail.

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DPG15.6 (also DPI 15.3) + KB, Sennheiser MB Pro 1 UC ML, BTD 800 dongle, Windows 10 Pro, MS Surface Book 3, Intel Core i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.3/1.5GHz (4 cores, 8 logical, GPU=NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 with Max-Q Design.