Find Spotlight slow when searching your e-mail? Justin Williams reviews MailSteward, a new utility that archives your e-mail and allows you to search it in a variety of ways.
When Steve Jobs announced Mac OS X Tiger at WWDC 2004, he proclaimed that search was one of the integral parts of any computer users repotoir. Be it searching the Web with a search engine like Google or your personal desktop using Spotlight, we spend a lot of our time searching for data on our Macs. Spotlight allows for the searching of all the metadata on your Mac, but in its present state it can be so slow it is almost unusable.
One of the major areas of desktop search is finding specific e-mails you either sent or received. Whether you are trying to find the note your professor sent you about the midterm or a message from a mailing list you subscribe to, we tend to reference our old e-mails often. E-mail is also one of the areas that causes the most frustration among users because of the sheer volume many of us receive. I sift through hundreds of messages a day and can become frustrated when it comes to trying to find a specific message using Mail’s Spotlight integration.
MailSteward is an e-mail archiving solution that imports your e-mail into a database of its own and allows for searching, sorting and exporting of your e-mail messages. With MailSteward you can import POP, IMAP and .Mac accounts as well as mbox files created in Microsoft Entourage.
How Does It Work?
MailSteward is powered by a application-specific SQLite database that keeps a full text archive of all of your e-mail. SQLite is the same technology that powers Tiger’s Core Data. By keeping e-mail in its own specific database, MailSteward is capable of performing faster searches for your criteria as compared to searching the entire Spotlight data store.
When you first launch the application, you will see a unique interface design to MailSteward. The brushed metal window contains six buttons on a vertical rectangle. This design allows for a lower barrier to entry for a novice user, but aesthetically I would prefer it to have a plan aqua design rather than Metal. Metal is fine in small doses, but only when its barely shown on the edges.
The first step to using MailSteward is to set a location for your database and choose which e-mail accounts you would like to import into the database. While the flexibility is appreciated, I would argue that it would be more friendly to just store the database in the user’s Application Support folder by default. After creating the database, you will need to import your e-mail messages into your database. This is a process that can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on how many e-mails you have and how fast your Mac is.
After your initial import, you will need to import any new messages manually using the same method as before. A nice touch is that it sets the beginning data of the import to the last data of your import so you won’t reimport existing messages. I would prefer to have a background process that allows new e-mails to be indexed periodically through the day or some other automation. The developer has promised it is coming soon.
Retrieving e-mails can be accomplished in two ways. For the regular user, you can specify a search via a date range, text data or an attachment name. For more advanced users, MailSteward allows your inner geek to craft SQL statements to run against the MailSteward database. You can also do this from the Terminal if you are running Mac OS X Tiger. Unlike Spotlight or Mails built-in search features, results from the MailSteward database are retrieved almost instantly.
Once you have a result set, you can save a specific e-mail from it or all of the messages in a plain text format. You can also export the result set to a tab delimited file, mbox file, secondary database or SQL file. You can also perform other actions with the result set: you can delete the messages, print selected one or reply in your default e-mail client.
Of Usability and Design
My biggest gripe with MailSteward has nothing to do with its functionality or feature set: it has to do with its usability and UI design. The application’s main window, while not attractive, is functional and easy to understand. Beyond that, however, I ran into several usability issues that left me frustrated. The biggest issue is that when the you store messages into the MailSteward database, the application is rendered unusable.
I suspect the application is single-threaded and runs everything on that one thread. By making the application multithreaded, the developer would be able to put the importing process on one thread and the user interface on another. That way the user could still work with the UI while the import is in progress. Another issue is when importing data into MailSteward a small window appears that lets you know data is importing. Unfortunately, this window doesn’t have any way to cancel the import option. In fact, there is no way to cancel the import once it begins. MailSteward is unusable until the import is complete.
The other issue I have with the interface is the design of the results page. When you get a results list, it is formatted in a large, unfriendly table. The results look more like a spreadsheet than a Mac application’s search result. I’d prefer a custom tableview layout that only shows the major information about the e-mail: to, from, subject and date. A friendlier design would make the application much more usable.
As I said, aside from a few usability issues, I liked the idea behind MailSteward. It makes searching for e-mail much quicker than using Spotlight. If you are a power user looking for a better way to archive and manage your e-mail check this application out. If you are a regular to moderate user of e-mail, it may not be for you. Either way, a free trial is available. The full version is available for $29.95.
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (2)
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#1) On March 13, 2006 10:59 PM
brilliant, completely useful - i agree with all issues over mailsteward design, unfortunately with the mass of emails out there I will be forced to use it
#2) On March 16, 2006 8:23 AM
What’s not explained is once you’ve archived your messages, then how do you go about deleting them? I think it’s confusing to try to figure out what folder a message came from. Also, MailSteward does not display HTML emails as Mail.app does. And in Mail.app if you have several attached images they all appear at once in a preview manner when viewing the email message. In MailSteward it’s necessary to click on each attached image separately. No slideshow feature either.