I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of emails that I want to keep.

Of course I get a lot of spam, as we all do, but I filter better than 90% of it before it hits my email client. I still end up with thousands of emails building up (sales records, receipts, passwords, that kind of thing).

I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and it’s great, but if you have a lot of accounts in it and lots of incoming email, it does slow down. Plus, who wants to keep thousands of emails in front of them all day long? You only need the ones you need and the rest should be filed somewhere neat and orderly.

It occurred to me that many of you might be in the same boat and looking for a nice, simple solution.

There’s a free program called MailStore Home, which addresses the issue of email bloat perfectly. I don’t really know why the creators of the application give the personal use version away for free, because I can’t imagine that many people would upgrade to the Server version for organizations. But I’m glad they do give it away and I find it a tremendously useful resource.

You can archive all your emails, even from several different sources, into MailStore Home, where it’s kept safe in a database for as long as you want. You can also burn archives to disc if they get too big. Best of all is the facility to search through the entire database (reasonably) quickly, searching for any keyword. You might remember that you got an email with Snagit licence codes, as I did when installing Snagit to capture some images for this post – but what if you can’t remember when you got it, or from whom? No problem.

One quick search later, using the keyword ‘snagit’ and MailStore Home had found the relevant emails for me. Previously I’ve made notes of licence numbers, printing off the original purchase email, but MailStore Home is much neater and easier.

You can see the application in the images here.

Main application panel

Search page

Results appear in the left column

Displaying the licence code

You can download a free copy over at Mailstore.com and you’ll find it works with most popular email clients, including Gmail, which is very handy. If you receive a lot of email and want to keep it safe, MailStore Home is a good utitility for doing just that.

Quick tip: create a couple of folders for emails from your favorite marketers. As you archive the emails you’ll have a great library of their campaigns. If you go back from time to time and study what they do and how they do it, you’ll see some regular patterns emerging. If you then study those patterns you’ll see what the marketers do that they don’t tell you about. A lot of marketers keep a few tricks up their sleeves, but in using them they leave a trail that you can follow. That trail is easier to see when you can look back through a particular folder of messages and see how each one leads to the next.

Archiving those folders means you can look back for inspiration at any time. You can even, if you want to, analyze marketing techniques used at different times of year. If big marketers are using a particular technique every summer for example, or at the start of the winter, there’s likely to be a very good reason for it.

All in all, MailStore Home is a handly little tool and available for free.

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3. Marketing Scams
4. Butterfly Marketing Manuscript
5. Thanks