Archiving Mail with MailSteward

If you're like me, you'll have a significant number of emails gathered over the years from multiple email accounts, usually from multiple service providers. You'll have some on your local machine, some in the cloud, some languishing on CD or DVD backups of machines past, well, you get the picture!

Are you using an IMAP account with thousands of emails needing to be synchronised every time you access that account on another machine? Is your email client struggling with the number of emails in your archived mailboxes?

Wouldn't it be great to collect all these emails into a separate application, designed to archive your email, and make search and retrieval a breeze.

Perhaps you're a big Gmail or MobileMe email user but feel slightly nervous about having all your important and sensitive emails held in the cloud? Wouldn't it be nice to gather all these emails up, place them in an optimised database locally and then delete all those copies hanging around in the cloud.

What about backups?

Do you know the current state of your email backups? Can you even access you old backups or are your old emails locked in some proprietary email format?

Well the answer to all these issues and more is provided by the subject of this weeks show and that's MailSteward.

MailSteward is a Mac application that allows you to archive all your email and email attachments into an optimised relational database, giving you full control of how you store, search and retrieve your email. Available in three versions, MailSteward, MailSteward Lite and MailSteward Pro, this unique application allows you to archive your emails into a SQLite (MailSteward & MailSteward Lite) database or for power users with more than 100, 000 emails to archive, into a MYSQL database (MailSteward Pro).

Once safely archived in the database, MailSteward gives you incredibly powerful search tools to easily find any emails or attachments in your personal database. Once you've found your information, MaiSteward allows you to print, save or export in many different ways including text, csv and tab delimited files, PDFS, email lists, MailSteward databases, SQL databases, mbox format and more. In addition, you can reply and forward to emails held within your archive database with just the click of a button.

Organise and search your emails using tags, including support for emails previoulsy tagged with MailTags by Indev software.

This show takes a look at all the major features of MailSteward including:

• MailSteward Introduction
• Preparing For Email Archiving
• MailSteward Settings
• Running an Archive Process
• Using MailSteward
• Printing, Saving & Exporting
• Using Tags
• Searching in MailSteward