“Great” isn’t how I would describe it. Searching for “delivery” from my inbox, when the third email in my inbox has a literal subject line of “delivery notification”? Zero results.
It used to break the search index sometimes, but I experienced it twice at most, and it searches instantly for me, never failed to find an e-mail I was looking for...
...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.
The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing.
But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.
It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.
At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.
“Great” isn’t how I would describe it. Searching for “delivery” from my inbox, when the third email in my inbox has a literal subject line of “delivery notification”? Zero results.
It’s great if you never search for email I guess.
It used to break the search index sometimes, but I experienced it twice at most, and it searches instantly for me, never failed to find an e-mail I was looking for...
...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.
The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing.
But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.
It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.
At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.
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When I open Gmail, whether an app or on the web, it already has the latest emails loaded. When I open Mail.app, I have to wait for them to download.
This is why Gmail is nicer in many areas.