Mail Steward
With over 30,000 emails in my Macintosh Mail application, searching had slowed to a crawl. My Mail.app seemed to be slower and buggier lately as well. Guessing that I had too many email messages in the database, I tried a highly-recommended email archiving program called MailSteward.
It's easy to use. Just click the "Setup" button and then click on a few checkboxes, then click "Store email in database." It took all night for it to index my files, but once it finished, I was able to clean out my email app and start from scratch. Now, at the end of each day, I click "Store email in database," button and MailSteward sucks all the new mail from that day into its database. $29.95
Comments
A cheaper alternative: make a new mailbox, drag a bunch of mail into it. Quit the app, find the mailbox in /YourUserAcct/Library/Mail/Mailboxes. Burn it to a disk or whatever and delete the original. Now, if you need something, you can pop the disk in open the mailbox from Mail.
Posted by: CrackWilding | March 19, 2006 10:11 AM
By the way, you can't have "too many email messages in the database", because mail is stored in flat files, not a database. Mail Steward *creates* a database, then imports mail into it.
And like CrackWilding said, you can just drag your mail elsewhere, or copy it from /Users/yourusername/Library/Mail/pathtowhatevermailbox/ to some other directory, which, unlike Mail Steward, is free.
Posted by: mns | March 29, 2006 2:37 PM
I haven't had any issues on my box…I have over 350,000 e-mails in my copy of Mail.
Posted by: Cap'n Hector | April 12, 2006 9:53 AM