Archive Your Email with MailSteward

I use Mail and Thunderbird (I keep my business accounts in Thunderbird) and they’re bursting at the seams. I have nothing but admiration for people who can read and file or delete email, but that’s not me. Consequently, everything sits in my inbox. The poor little angel who, after the apocalypse, has to cleanup and archive all the email in the world is going to hate me.

Mail Steward is an application that, although not for ordering your email, can at least let you archive it so you can have a nice clean mailbox.

Features
MailSteward works seamlessly with Apple’s Mail, but requires some effort to work with other email clients. MailSteward archives your mail to a searchable SQL database so you longer need to leave it sitting in Mail. From the MailSteward website, some of its features are:

* Works seamlessly with the Mac OS X Apple Mail app to archive all your email in a relational database.
* Will import most mbox files exported from Microsoft Entourage, Eudora, and other email clients.
* Works with all locally-stored POP, .Mac, and IMAP email accounts in the OS X Mail app.
* Select email from archive by date range and keywords in the To, From, Subject, Mailbox, or Body fields.
* Sort by date, To, From, Subject, Mailbox, or unique ID.
* Add your own tags to email & import MailTags©
* Schedule MailSteward to archive your email automatically.
* Search binary attachments that contain any text.
* Print email list, or individual email, or all email in a list.
* Save email list, or individual email, or all retrieved email to a text file.
* Reply to individual emails.
* Export emails to a tab-delimited text file, a separate database file, an mbox file, or an SQL file.
* Merge database files together.
* All email folders are left undisturbed.
* Options to store attachments, HTML, enriched text, and raw source, as well as plain text.
* Universal binary runs on PowerPC and Intel Macs.
* Native Cocoa application that supports OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and greater.

The demo version is full-featured, but archives a maximum of 3,000 emails. If you have more than that, the full unlimited version costs US $49.95. Or you can buy a feature limited version, MailStewardLite, for $24.95 that has all of the archiving and searching functionality but lacks the advanced features such as exporting, tagging, and merging databases. Site licences are also available.

A comparison between the versions plus Apple’s Mail and Spotlight is available on the Mail Steward website.

In action
Before my first archive, I changed the location of the MailSteward database and did a little house keeping on my email, deleting emails that were obviously not required. e.g. Apple’s and other newsletters, bank account notifications, mail delivery errors etc. That reduced by a couple of hundred, unnecessary emails.

Here’s a few points about my experience with it:
- By default, MailSteward only archives mail in your In and Sent mailboxes, but this can be changed in the preferences.
- First thing I’ve discovered is it doesn’t support Thunderbird directly. You will need to find a way to export email from Thunderbird to an mbox format that MailSteward can then import.
- On importing, you can select and limit either by accounts or mailboxes.
- It prompts and tells you what it’s going to do. When an app is messing with your email, it’s nice to have that extra reassurance it’s not going to delete your email.
- Email can be restored by exporting to an mbox file and then importing to Mail
- You can reply to an email in MailSteward. It will launch your email client using the To and From address from the email. This has one small drawback if the email was to a group of people, as it will use the first address in the “To” list - which probably won’t be yours.
- My 2800 emails only took a few minutes to import.
- It’s not the most attractive interface. Quite bland really. It could do with a 21st Century makeover. But it is functional and the application does what it sets out to.
- Searching is quick and extensive, even allowing you to edit the SQL search statement if that takes your fancy. You can search by fields or tags.
- MailSteward can search attachments. This is one advantage it has over Mail, which only searches the body of emails. Thus, for example, you could search all emails from Bob with attachments containing mention of say “health and safety”. Neat!
- MailSteward can search date ranges. Again an advantage over Mail.

Shortcomings
In searching, you encounter MailSteward’s biggest shortcoming: it doesn’t let you search multiple words in a field. You can only search for a single word or phrase. Thus, if you enter “writing study” in the body field, it will return all emails containing that exact phrase. The only way to tell MailSteward you want to search for emails containing the words “writing” and “study” is to use the SQL search statements. However, these can be a bit intimidating for many people. For instance, here’s the part of the search statement to search for all emails containing the words “study” and “writing”: WHERE (body_fld LIKE “%writing%” AND body_fld LIKE “%study%”) ORDER BY UPPER(date_fld)

It’s not as bad as it looks, but the user shouldn’t really have to go to that level to search on multiple words. Especially as for a programmer it is dead easy to code.

The lack of support for other email clients - especially Thunderbird - will limit the appeal of MailSteward.

The other issue is of course the dated and amateurish looking interface. It looks like a metallized version of a direct port of a 1993 Visual Basic application.

Overall
The main purpose of MailSteward is to clear your email boxes by archiving it where you can still access it,and this it does very well. One disadvantage is that in our modern online world, you might like having access to your email online and deleting from Mail could delete it from its online location (such as .Mac).

However, emEmail archiving is becoming more and more popular (particularly in a business environment) and MailSteward provides one reasonable solution, especially in a multi-user environment, but the developer does need to address its shortcomings. If you need to archive email, make sure you give Mail Steward a look. 7.5/10