Comment by lproven
7 months ago
I've been on email since 1985 and had the same personal address since 1991. I've used about 20 or 25 email clients across a dozen OSes (counting all Linux distros as one).
Gmail has the best search of any email system I've found.
I think your problems are nothing to do with Gmail or its search, but are to do with things like Unicode character encoding, character sets and codepoint matching.
Gmail search is objectively awful. I can feed it verbatim phrases from an email I've checked exists and it won't find it. I've used parametrised queries and it fails.
I'm happy it works for you, but it consistently doesn't for me.
The reason feels obvious: they're handling exabytes of email and building a full search index just for me is expensive. They cut serious corners.
I would be keenly interested if you can offer any steps to reproduce the problems you describe, so that others can try to see if the same happens to them.
1. Remember an email you definitely have without looking for it directly. For me this has recently been the conveyancing contract for our last house purchase. About 4 years old.
2. Search for it.
I tried looking for the sender. The company. The address. The date range. The email wasn't available until I pages through my emails by date.
It's like it'd been cold archived, invisible from search. Oddly enough now I've manually excavated them, I can find them.
This has happened a few times for me. This is a Workspace account. I'm Domain admin and there aren't any weird settings. The account is big, ~15GB of email over 20 years?
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