If you use email, you need MailStore

We all use email in precisely the way we’re told not to. We use it to permanently store important events, documents and just about everything else. And no matter how good your folder system is — no matter how many hours of categorization and tagging you might be willing to spend (or, really, have wasted) — using search to find something you need is painful.

I don’t care if you are using Gmail, Outlook, the web or even Thunderbird: search stinks. You know the feeling. You recall a few keywords. You know those words are in the message. But the search results return an emailed receipt from a store for crew socks. In short, poor search results add to the frustration of finding what you need.

Years ago, Steve Gibson turned me on to MailStore.

MailStore is magical — and free for personal use. It indexes everything: old .pst files, M365 Exchange Online accounts, Gmail. And search is both instant and accurate. It’s what Outlook search should have been least a decade ago but for some reason has never mastered. Note the 14 different accounts and files in the screenshot. Some are so old I barely remember them. Today, I retrieved a message from 2003 today in seconds. (I should’ve probably printed that one out. But that’s before I used MailStore.)

Best of all, you can rely on MailStore. The guys at MailStore have never wavered from supporting the free product. They’ve updated it regularly. And it’s one of the very few products that works reliably every time I use it. It runs perfectly — and quickly — in portable mode on Windows 11 ARM running in a VM on an M1 Mac. (German engineering at work here?)

I can’t remember the last time I used my blog to gush about a product. But this is what I tell any client who uses email: get MailStore.

Thanks so much for this, MailStore. I can no longer imagine email without it.

If you need to search email, you need MailStore.