MailSteward is just terrific. It does everything it claims to, but there's another unexpected benefit: You don't have to throw out the original messages in your Mail mailboxes, but when I did, suddenly a set of mysterious recent Mail problems just went away. Now Mail runs as smooth as silk.

Even cooler, the whole computer is faster now - OS, applications, everything. I have a Mac Pro, so I have plenty of RAM and speed and all the rest, so Mail must have been hogging resources in the background trying to sort things out. Mail is a wonderful application for sending and receiving messages, but it's not good at all for storage.

MailSteward archives all your messages automatically every night, or whenever you choose. Within it you can search for messages by up to seven different variables simultaneously, and the searches are extremely fast.

Until you're sure that all your messages were transferred correctly, you can leave them all in Mail's mailboxes. But soon you'll see that everything is fine. Then you can delete all the old stuff in Mail and enjoy the improved general performance. Every morning you can delete anything you don't need immediately, knowing there's a copy of it in a highly searchable database. I can't guarantee that other people will experience the system-wide change, but I definitely did.

I should add that MailSteward support is fantastic. The developer answered several of my newbie questions immediately, responded to a bug report with a new version the same day and sent it to me, and agreed to a feature request.

One hint: When searching its database for one variable, be sure that the AND option is chosen, not OR. "To" and "Subject" both show OR as the default, and that's not always what you need.

In my opinion, adopting MailSteward is a no-brainer. You'll definitely love it.