Comment by dspillett

> but for searching my Gmail, it’s Outlook, ironically, which works the best.

How bad I find the search in Outlook and Teams is one of the reasons I refuse to trust Bing. I know they are completely separate divisions, but still…

Both they and gmail have trouble finding someple words and sentence fragments that I know are in there and, worse, instead of just saying they can't find it they often return a bunch of useless stuff just-in-case I meant that instead.

I keep thinking of writing an IMAP->SQL interface¹ so I can search more manually that way. Or even just mapping to files in a filesystem² so I can find/grep/etc, though the DB option would also allow some more complex searches (search for X in messages that are replies to messages containing Y, for example).

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[1] Keeping mail on the mail server, but syncing it with a DB. This is more complicated than it would first sound as it will mean decoding MIME and various sub-encodings to extract the plain text so I can properly query it, hence that project is still on my “when hell freezes over so I have enough free time” list.

[2] Yeah, maildir and similar storage formats already do this, but there is still the unpacking/decoding issue before being able to directly search the text of many messages.