Report of Mail being hindered by years of emails scares possible switcher

I was about to move from Eudora to Mail 4.3 until. . .

I read MacUser’s review of MailSteward (UK EDition 16th July 2010), which starts, "The more accumulated burden of years of emails hinders Mail's performance, the more attractive archiving becomes." MailSteward is seen as a solution to archiving.

As a Eudora user, I don't understand how and why Mail becomes overburdened with the accumulation of years of emails. If old emails are transfered to other Mail mailboxes, doesn't Mail ignore them if they are unopened and unused?

In Eudora, I archive old emails by clearing out a year's worth at a time into new mailboxes with names such as "2007in" and "2007out".

If I close mailboxes, it seems that Eudora doesn't load them until I use them again. At any one time very few mailboxes are open or loaded and Eudora doesn't seem overburdened although I have emails going back to 1996, if I care to view them.

I don't have to archive such old emails in MailSteward or anything similar, the old mailboxes are always available to be opened or searched in Eudora, with no detectable performance hit.

Thanks Queso and andiwm. That's good news. I wonder that there's a market for MailSteward then! It seems so more satisfactory to have all one's emails accessible for one and the same application.

When I first tried Mail, its version 2 lacked so much compared to Eudora that I stuck with Eudora. With a new MacBook Pro, I could now use Mail 4.3 of 2010, while Qualcomm's Eudora ceased development sometime around 2006 (although I gather a version of Thunderbird has been 'Eudora-ized').

So I tried out Mail 4.3 and it seems to have most of what I want. However, one area where Eudora still seems far better is the search facility. It seems that in Mail:

• You can't search the body text of emails without the header fields or search the From and To fields at the same time (useful if you want to find all the correspondence with a certain person in both directions)
• You can only search for strings at the start of a word (eg, searching for Mac won't find iMac). You can't specify that you're searching for a whole word, any word that ends with a string, or any matching word containing a string no matter where in the word.
• I found combining search criteria rather limited; while 'Smith Jones' seems to find messages containing both Smith and Jones and 'Smith -Jones' will find messages containing only Smith and excluding those that also have Jones, I failed to find any way of using Boolean operators to find either 'yacht' or 'boat' in the body of the message.

Thanks Mal, it's useful to know that several thousand messages in a mailbox slows things down.

Although I filter a some topics into mailboxes of their own, I like to keep the rest of the current year's and the previous year's messages in the inbox and outbox. Once I'm well into a new year, I move the oldest entire year into year-labelled boxes, such as 2007in and 2007out. A year's worth of incoming messages can be up to 2,500 so, with the previous year's as well, my inbox can reach some 5,000 and my outbox, although somewhat less, can also be well into the thousands.

It looks as if this policy wouldn't work well with Mail. And as I mentioned in my previous post to this thread, the searching seems more restricted in Mail than in Eurora. I gather that after Qualcomm ended internal development of Eudora, it passed the IP over to Mozilla who have developed a Eudora-ized version of Thunderbird, called Eudora 8. I think my next move will be to investigate Eudora 8.