EmailAttic vs MailStore Home

By Michael, founder of EmailAttic · September 2026 · 6 min read

MailStore Home is the name people reach for first when they want to keep their email locally — and deservedly so. It's a genuinely good, free tool. So the honest question isn't "which is better," it's which job are you trying to do. EmailAttic and MailStore Home overlap, but they're built for different problems.

What they have in common

Both run entirely on your own computer — no cloud, no account, nothing uploaded. Both can read email from the usual messy sources: Outlook PST and OST files, MBOX, individual EML messages, Google Takeout exports, IMAP/POP mailboxes. Both keep one copy of each message rather than storing obvious duplicates twice. If your only requirement is "get my mail off the cloud and onto my disk," either will do it.

The core difference: a searchable archive vs. folders you own

MailStore Home's model is a central archive you open inside MailStore. It pulls your mailboxes into its own store and gives you a fast, powerful search across all of it. It's excellent at exactly that — an ongoing, searchable vault of your live and past mailboxes, on Windows.

EmailAttic's model is different. It's built for the drawer full of old backup files — the mail2009-FINAL.pst, the three overlapping Takeout zips, the dead laptop's .ost — and its output is not a database you view in an app. It's ordinary folders of standard message files, organized by whose mailbox each message belongs to, that you can open in anything, back up anywhere, and still read in twenty years whether or not EmailAttic is around.

When MailStore Home is the better choice

If you're on Windows, you want to keep archiving your current mailboxes on a schedule, and the thing you value most is searching all your mail in one place — MailStore Home is a great fit, and it's free. There's no reason to pay for something else to do that.

When EmailAttic is the better choice

EmailAttic earns its keep when the problem is mess and duplication, not search:

• You have years of email scattered across old drives, dead accounts and half-a-dozen backup files, and you want it reconciled into one clean archive with the duplicates removed and a report proving nothing was lost.
• You want the result to be plain, portable folders you control — not locked inside any single program's store.
• You want it filed by person (whose mailbox it was), so a family's or a business's mail is finally sorted, not just piled together.
• You're on Linux, or you want the same tool to work on both.

What about the price?

MailStore Home is free, EmailAttic is a one-time $59.99 (with a free trial first). You're not paying for "local email storage" — that's table stakes for both. You're paying for the consolidation-and-cleanup: the extraction from every messy backer format, the message-level de-duplication, the organize-by-mailbox, and the accounting that lets you finally delete the old files with receipts instead of guesses. If that's the job, it pays for itself the first time you reclaim a drawer of drives.