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

TextSoap, the text cleaning and formatting utility, has been updated.

The new version is more more stable and usable.

Previously, TextSoap crashed under some configurations (bad) and the Contextual Menu items would sometimes disappear (bad). Also, opening a plain text file did not always use the plain text font (annoying). But these issues are now fixed.

It also includes a work-around for working with text in Mail.app 2.x, which has a peculiar way of supporting two-way Services.

TextSoap costs USD 24.99, but a 30 day demo is available from the developer?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s web site .text, tips, helpful apps, mail.app, apple mail, textsoap, cleaning, formatting, text utilities, Services

I’ve blogged before about how I use OS X’s Services to make life easier in Apple Mail, especially about Devon’s Word Services.

Textsoap takes text manipulation to an even higher level.

It provides a graphical interface (as well as Services) for over 70 different ways of treating text, whether in Mail.app, a word processor or a text editor.

It comes with plugins for TextWrangler and BBEdit, Eudora and MailSmith and works natively with Cocoa-based apps like Apple Mail and Pages.

With AppleScript you can extend its reach to cover Entourage, Word and AppleWorks.

“Scrub” is a pre-set series of text cleaning actions that removes forwarding characters, rewraps paragraphs and more at the press of a single button. You can customise it further with the “my scrub” feature.

But the interface also offers easy access to other functions, like setting the quote level of text quickly, adding initial capitals, changing between upper and lower case and much much more.

You can use it with the built-in editor or with its plug-ins and services inside any app you choose.

Recently the ability to clean Rich Text has been added to its plain text capabilities.

TextSoap costs money (Devon’s Word Services doesn’t), but USD 24.99 is not much to pay for the time it saves if you work with decent quantities of text. A 30 day demo is available from the developer’s web site.services, rich text, text formatting, cleaning