How To Store 10 Years And 10,000 Email Messages.

How many email messages do you have on your Mac? Are they archived and backed up?

Do you have so many email messages that they’re hogging your Mac and slowing down email? How can you archive thousands of messages and retrieve them in minutes?

Those are tough questions. Email messages become one of two things over a long period of time. They’re either very valuable and need to be stored, or they’re worthless and need to be pruned.

In the media business we often hear, “Half my advertising dollar is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” So it is with those thousands of email messages we’ve collected through the years.

Half are probably worthless, the other half are very valuable and we need to archive them—we just don’t know which half. So we save everything and avoid the pruning pain.

Bambi and I both love Microsoft’s Entourage and have used it as our main email application since the days of Mac OS Classic, pre-Mac OS X days. Yes, we use Apple’s Mail for non-business accounts, so we have mail scattered everywhere.

How much email have you collected over the past 10 years? Is it all sitting inside various folders of Mail or Entourage? Are you afraid to throw any of the messages away, but don’t want to invest the time to sort through and discard the worthless messages?

You’re not alone. Stored email messages can be valuable, particularly in business, and keeping them tidy and archived can be a pain. For most of us, our solution is to keep nearly everything. The problem is that keeping everything makes for lots of messages, which can impede your Mac’s performance.

Don’t even get me started on the organization issues of having over 10,000 email messages dated back to over 10 years ago. Sorry, folks; even Spotlight doesn’t do a good job finding all my email (I blame it on Microsoft).

Wouldn’t it be great if you could take all those thousands of email messages and stuff them into a database somewhere?

Then, when you need to, you could search and get results quickly and easily?

I feel your pain. Hey, I had your pain. I also have a solution for Mail and Entourage users. It’s called MailSteward. If you have a couple of thousand email messages dating back just a few years, MailSteward is not for you.

For the rest of us, those with email messages dating back into the last century, with more email than we have dollars in the bank, MailSteward may be the answer to the question you didn’t know you were asking but were afraid not to think about.

Simply put, MailSteward sucks email from Mail or Entourage into a database. Email text, email threads, HTML messages, attachments, everything goes into the database.

MailSteward is about as Mac Friendly™ as you can get. Click on the Archive button and copies of your email go into the database. Once in the database, email can be sorted, tagged, exported, searched. You get that “all’s finally well with the world feeling” knowing valuable email is backed up.

When compared, the archiving of OS X Mail and Entourage is about the same. Not much. Spotlight can help because it searches Mail very well, Entourage not so well. MailSteward Lite does more than any Mac application does to archive and retrieve email messages.

Well, almost. It doesn’t do more than MailSteward, which automatically archives email, exports to many different flavors, including MySQL. Databases are easily saved outside of your home or office for even more protection.

What is your email worth to you? Are there so many messages and folders that you don’t really know where anything is so you just keep adding to the pile? Archive them instead. I did it. And I encouraged Bambi to do the same. She has thousands more messages on her Mac than I have on my Mac.

For most Mac users with thousands of email messages stored in a few dozen folders, MailSteward Lite might do the trick at only $25. A business may prefer MailSteward’s extra database import and export and management capabilities.

I’ll admit that I felt better once I could stuff those messages into a database, yet still have full search capability, including attachments.

How much email is sitting on your Mac? How many different folders is your mail sitting in? Does Spotlight do the job you want and need to find old email? Share your experience in the Comments section below.