There are days when my PowerBook feels more like an email terminal than a full-fledged computer. I can’t believe how much email I have to deal with. I’ve been looking at backup solutions to help relieve some pressure from Mail.app, and my latest candidate is MailSteward.
This SQLite database isn’t the prettiest Mac app I’ve ever used, but it does tackle the challenge of storing all of my mail and attachments. It works with all locally-stored POP, .Mac, and IMAP email accounts.
I haven’t purchased the $30 app yet — still trying it in demo mode. Some of the things I like about it are its ability to sort and organize mail by various criteria, then printing, saving, deleting, or exporting these results.
I’m using an external LaCie mobile drive to store my database. Again no real problems so far. But ultimately, what I would like to do is move data out of my Mail.app and into a backup database such as MailSteward. Is anyone doing this now, and if so, what are your experiences?
I've been using MailSteward a little bit for a while now. Not long ago, I archived all the messages from one of my accounts into it, since I was losing access to the account and wanted to get it out of Mail, but needed to be able to refer to the old messages easily.
MailSteward has been great for that, letting me easily browse my old messages or search for specific items I needed to look up. I can even grab archived attachments from the database quite easily.
Now, I haven't pushed it very hard yet, but I'm happy enough that I paid for it.
I can pretty much do all this and do this well in Eudora, so I'm still sticking with it for now.
Yeah, I'm with Erica. Eudora takes care of all these issues for me. Like SQLite, it's not the prettiest program in the world, but it's powerful.
I've been using MailSteward for little over a year now (roughly v3). I have roughly 31k emails in my database and everything is working fine. The developer is very helpful and responsive and updates are frequent. While some might not think its pretty, I tend to think its not in your face. It just gets the job done. If you find that one old serial number from an app you bought online it will be worth the $30. Not to mention your IT Dept and your email client, whatever you use, will thank you for cleaning out your Inbox.
Alternatively, you might want to take a look at something like ZOË:
http://zoe.nu/
Quick introduction:
Googling Your Email
Mandatory screenshots. Download.