MailSteward for Mac

I have never made a review before. And for many reasons I have become very disappointed, even disgruntled with Apple and my MacBook Air and my iPad. But I wanted to share here the main reason I still use my MacBook Air - what I believe is the best mail archive program out there - for Mac or Windows - MailSteward. Up front - two reasons: (1) it is the only mail archive program I have used with which I never had a problem of it not finding an email. When other programs failed to find something I was sure was there, I always returned to MailSteward, and it found the emails. (2) John Seward has always provided outstanding tech support - always zoomed in on the problem, or lack thereof, and resolved my issue. What’s more, I usually get a response in hours, sometimes minutes. For me, he defines good tech support - knows the product inside-out, actually provides quality support, and does so in a timely manner. That said, I would like to share the best example of how I know what I speak of. In 2018 I made my first ever online course purchase. I then moved to Spain, then to Kuwait, then back to Spain. In 2020 I moved back to the USA. My editor convinced me to pursue my attempts to get my $3000 back through the Better Business Bureau. I spent weeks going through multiple computers and hard disks, to review recorded webinars, recorded phone conversations, and yse, emails. I made transcripts and spread sheets to submit my casse. What is important here, is that using other mail archive programs, I could not find some emails I was sure existed, and that would support my case. In comes MailSteward. I had to combine/merge some data, but I used MailSteward and indeed found all the needed emails. Additional details: I am a collector. I never delete an email. I never waste time trying to organize emails. I rely on searches to find what I need. I have archived decades of email, many hundreds of thousands of emails, tens of Gigabytes of data. MailSteward is not the fastest archive program. The two I used on Windows are much faster, yet at times, for unknown reasons, they cannot find something. It reminds me of the not completely reliable search on Amazon - I have put an exact product name I just saw minutes ago on Amazon into the Amazon search, and it will not come up. Yes, very unusual occurance - but when you need to find an important email, reliability trumps speed. A final note - despite my complete documentation of my BBB case, it was denied, appealed, denied, ignored. Due to some circumstances I choose not to share here, after three years, dealing with a company with a complete lack of integrity (in my humble opinion), I did indeed receive a full refund of my roughly $3000. And MailSteward was a big help in that.

I have used the free and paid up cheaper versions for several years and have found the retrieval from archives has been a life-saver. HOWEVER there have been various glitches, the last being related to upgrading to OS X Big Sur. Having paid $49.95 in August 2019, it looks as if another payment to upgrade is now needed. These are not trivial sums, and committing to using MailSteward does seem to mean periodic financial haemorrhages. Functionality when working is 5-stars but overall not 5

I have used MailSteward for a very long time. The app has been bulletproof until recently. Over the last year, I've unexplainably lost thousands of emails and now my files corrupt on a regular basis. I've contacted the company, but they offer little help other than to rebuild my databases which doesn't seem to work. He has also told me that I'm the only person with that problem which I find hard to believe since there is seldom one of anyting. The app is no longer reliable for me.

After upgrading Mac OS to Mojave MailSteward 13.1.5 does not show MailBoxes in Accounts panel.

This has been my default Mail backup client for as long as I have owned a MAC. The developer releases periodic updates, with new releases that require a small fee for upgrade. The program works very well (I would recommend MailSteward rather than the lite version) you can set schedules, set up databases etc. It has full search handling and will also store attachments etc. Like any database program it can slow while searching, especially if you database is big. Mine is currently around 8 GB and it takes a minute or two to search for emails. It has never crashed on me, and you can export files, print etc from within the program. I wouldn't be without this program. The initial purchases fee is high, but you are getting a stable program with minor upgrade fees between major version changes. Well worth the money I paid for it.