Review: Pubblog MailSteward 7.0
- Article 15 of 89
- MacFormat, May 2006
This app aims to make you the master of your emails.
Can't find that email you've been looking for? If Spotlight isn't powerful enough and your email program is too slow, MailSteward should be just the thing, although it's by no means perfect.
Once you've imported your emails into MailSteward's database, they're readily searchable use a number of methods. There's basic sorting and browsing; MailSteward is certainly faster than Mail and Entourage at these particular tasks, especially as the number of messages mounts up.
A more sophisticated Search interface for finding data in particular email fields is equally fast and is more than adequate for most tasks. But it doesn't provide much flexibility, the "and/or" criteria for each field being fixed and unchangeable, making certain searches impossible.
So for more advanced searches, you'll need to enter SQL commands into a separate window. If you know SQL, it's an extremely powerful way of searching your email database; if you don't, it's useless, since MailSteward isn't going to give you any help.
There are a couple of important problems with MailSteward. Since you need to import your emails into its database, you'll have to ensure it's up-to-date yourself. If you use Mail, MailSteward can import your emails directly, but if you use another email program, you'll need to export your emails as MBOX files first. This results in plenty of package-specific information (such as Entourage's categories and projects) getting lost along the way. Most of the important data will survive the process, but you still need to rely on your email program's built-in functions for some searches.
More importantly, MailSteward's display of emails is flawed. You need to view HTML versions of emails in a separate window and they're often wrong. If characters have been encoded in the emails in "quoted-printable" or similar format, MailSteward won't decode them. This makes it hard, but not impossible to read some messages.
MailSteward is overly expensive and rough round the edges. Depending on the software you have, there may be better choices, such as Mail Archiver X or Entourage Email Archive X. But for anyone who has a large number of emails, who understands SQL and who can maintain a regular update regime, it's a powerful choice.