The latest version of the email archiving and searching app, MailSteward, offers support for MailTags .

That means it will recognize and import your metadata along with your messages and allow you to search with it by category, keywords, notes and/or priority. You can also add new tags to the archived messages. Nifty!

The new version also offers searching of HTML emails with no plain text, editing of MailSteward-generated SQL statements and other minor bug fixes and enhancements.

The interface has also been reworked and looks cleaner.

All of this archiving goodness comes with a price hike though. MailSteward now costs 49.95. A demo is available from the developer’s web site .mailtags, email, archiving, backup, searching, plugins, html, metadata

PocketLight is an OS 10.3 search app for Mail.app, iCal, Address Book and files in specified folders that was developed before Tiger was released. Spotlight overtakes it, but users still on Panther can enjoy its Spotlight-like abilities.

The developer has released a final version of the app, which will no longer be updated.

It won’t run on 10.4, so I can’t provide a screenshot, but the interface looks (briefly before it quits) like Spotlight, offering matches for your search term in a separate “Spotlight pane” for Mail, iCal and Address Book

It contains French, Italian and German localisations.

PocketLight is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .panther, spotlight, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, searching

Quicksilver, LaunchBar and Butler users will benefit from a tip on macOSXHints which provides search strings that they can use to quickly launch searches of their Gmail messages.

The tip includes the string for LaunchBar but the comments from Rob Griffiths and others provide the same information for Quicksilver and Butler users.

Lantrix’s comment lower down also offers a quick tutorial on how to set the string up as a web search in Quicksilver. Quick. Nifty.gmail, quicksilver, butler, launchbar, tip, searching

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

More reports of IMAP woes in Mail.app:

1. Alan Gutierrez says that Apple Mail is just “too pitifully” slow when seaching IMAP accounts, even when they are cached locally.
2. Thomas at BSDUNix says that Mail.app sucks — “You can’t subscribe to mailboxes and it’s awful slow with large imap mailboxes.”
3. Although Paul Westbrook notes that Mail handles losing the IMAP connection well, he discovers two other quirks with IMAP in Mail.app — in copying nested IMAP folders and in using accounts that are over-quota.

End result? 66% user-drain to Thunderbird. mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, imap, over-quota, subscribing, folders, searching, mailboxes