Mail Archiver is an app that archives and cleans the mailboxes of Mail.app (and PowerMail, Eudora, Mozilla, Thunderbird and Entourage).

Version 1.5b4 features a new icon and interface. The new interface has been simplified and beautified and the odd floating window of previous versions is gone.

It offers full support for Mail 2.0 and Filemaker 8. The attachments are now saved to the archive and the app boasts better MIME handling overall.

Mail Archiver X’s main competitors in the archiving stakes are MailSteward and FastMailBase.

In contrast to these, Mail Archiver X promotes itself as “the only mail archival application, which also offers cleaning of mails”. This means the ability to strip HTML, control tags and various other characters out of your emails, so that only clean copies of the useful material are retained:

Mail Archiver X is shareware (USD 34.95), fifteen dollars cheaper than Mail Steward (USD 49.95). FastMailBase is about twice the cost of Mail Steward (USD 97).

Which one is the best? MailSteward offers more sophisticated searching. Mail Archiver X offers cleaning. It depends on you and what you want from an archiving app.

Mail Archiver X is available from the developer’s web site .archiving, backup, mail.app, apple mail, cleaning, html, plugins

toread is a web service that allows you to “bookmark” or email yourself web pages with the single click of browser bookmarklet.

Of course, Safari users can do this manually by pressing Command-I, which sends the contents of a web page to a new Mail.app message, filling in their own email address and then sending the email.

This is much quicker and cleaner.

After registration, you are offered a bookmarklet to drag and drop into the Bookmarks Bar of your browser (I use Safari):

One click on this bookmarklet and the page you are looking at is emailed to your inbox:

There’s nothing else to do.

This may appeal especially to people who use Mail.app as an Information mananger, allowing for the quick and painless archiving of web pages.

The privacy policy of the service, which is run by the Japanese RSS management company Sidefeed looks OK to me:

About disclosing your personal information

We will not sell, rent or lease your personal information to any other third party.
We will disclose your personal information to outside third parties only when one or any of the following conditions are met.

When we have your consent to share the information.
To process and fulfill your order or notify you of order status.
When it’s necessary for us to observe the law.
When it’s necessary to protect and defend your rights or property.
When it’s based on the statistical purposes without any information that could be used to link that information to you.
We reserve the right to disclose any and all pertinent customer information to law enforcement or other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate.

It is a clearly a Web 2.0 service, as it is in beta.email, bookmarks, bookmarklets, browser, archiving, web pages

A new version of MailSteward, the email archiving and search app, has been released.

MailSteward 6.0 has a redesigned storage process which parses and stores your email simultaneously rather than in two stages. It will now show you which message is being processed and allow you to stop and restart the archiving process at any stage.

The new version also offers the ability to hide, bring to front, stop, or quit the app during processing and will display a list of invalid email files after the Store operation.

MailSteward is shareware (USD 29.95) and is available from the developer’s web site .mailsteward, archiving, searching, mail.app, apple mail, plugin, archive

MailSteward, an email archiving and search app, has been updated.

The new version (5.5.0) features an in-built HTML viewer, so that launching an external browser is not longer necessary. It will also now display statistics after storing messages and checks for invalid email files while parsing.

A “Find” function has been added for searching within email and raw source views.

MailSteward is shareware (USD 29.95) and is available from the developer’s web site Mailsteward, archiving, storing, searching, email, mail.app, apple mail

MailSteward, a powerful email archiving app, has been updated.

One hardly need mention that it is now recompiled as a universal binary (what isn’t these days?).

Other improvements in the new release include better display of non-English text, a better export mbox function that imports back into Mail.app correctly, a bugfix for the omission of CC: addresses and other minor bugfixes.

The developer Pubblog.com produces a useful chart that demonstrates the range of MailSteward‘s features (although listing FastMailBase for comparison would be even more helpful):

Click for a larger view (Don’t be shy. I’ve got bandwidth to burn these days)

MailSteward is shareware (USD 29.95) and is available from the developer?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s web site .

Jason Clarke takes exception to an often-repeated productivity tip (e.g. on Lifehacker ) that subject lines should be edited to reflect the content of the message.

He points out that this will bust the threading on Gmail and other email clients (like Mail.app – as Greg rightly points out in the comments, Mail.app is not fooled by edited subject lines, but lists all the messages in the same thread.)

So the short term gain of added communication has to be balanced against the longer term loss of archive and search functionality. mail.app, apple mail, Gmail, threading, edit, subject line, archiving

The email archiving and searching app MailSteward has been updated.

Version 4.0 is a universal binary.

It also adds the option to store the raw source of the email in the database and features major speed improvements for its merge, save and export functions.

The update brings minor interface improvements and bug fixes to the app as well.

You can read more about MailSteward in an in-depth review on MacZealots.

MailSteward is shareware (USD 29.95) and is available from the developer’s web site.