Mailbag Assistant by Marcus Friedländer

Mailbag Assistant is a utility to manage your email in ways beyond those supported by most email clients. This is a program for email power users. Mailbag Assistant can handle mail from many email clients such as Eudora, The Bat!, Outlook Express, Poco Mail, Calypso, Netscape, and others. With Mailbag Assistant you can open the mailbox and do simple or advanced searches. You can then create archives with the subset of messages resulting from your search. This way you can quickly find the messages you really want to keep. The archives can have messages appended to them.

A usage suggestion would be to create Mailbag Assistant archives of important messages, so that you can clear out folders inside your mailbox and keep your mailbox lean.

Beyond that you can extract messages to HTML. Mailbag Assistant even has its own scripting language, so you can write your own routines for operations you do frequently.

Another advantage is that you can use different mail clients and create archives from them. If you ever switched email clients once then now you can open up the old archives and archive messages from it together with messages from your current email client and have them all together, archived by topic for example.

The installation is smooth. A wizard helps you open your first mailbox. The online help is informative, helpful, and written in simple non-technical language.

I don't know of any alternatives on the Windows platform. The only mail management methods I know of are web based. For example Mhonarc to create HTML archives, and then a search utility such as Htdig. Mailbag Assistant is quite different, goes beyond the capabilities of the web-based options and is of course easier and quicker to install.

Mailbag Assistant has been around several years now, I originally tried it in 1998 or 1999, and has had time to mature. You can trust that user feedback and support will be good based on the developers reputation with one of their other products NoteTab Pro. There is also a support mailing list.

Mailbag Assistant is a powerful tool for anybody with masses of mail to manage and can be recommended.

Mailbag Assistant can be downloaded from:
http://www.fookes.com/mailbag/

--Marcus Friedländer