alt Hacker NewsMy biggest complaints about search come from day-to-day uses:
I use search in my email pretty heavily, and I’m most interested in specific words in the email; and when those emails are from specific folks or a specific domain. But, the mobile version of Gmail produces different results than the mobile Outlook app than the desktop version of Gmail, and all of them are pretty terrible at search as it pertains to email.
I have a hard to getting them to pull up emails in search that I know exist, that I know have certain words, and I know have certain email addresses in the body.
I recognize a generalized searching mechanisms is going to get domain specific nuances wrong, but is it really so hard to make a search engine that works on email and email based attachments that no one cares enough to try?
Huh, maybe your use case is around the indexing of the contents of attachments? I basically never search for the contents of attachments, just the clip does of emails, and have found gmail search to be really good. I switched back to the web client from Mac’s native mail app for this reason because search has been so good for me in Gmail.
I haven’t looked, but I wonder if there is a good hackable email client that will let you substitute out the search index with a reasonable abstraction from all the complicated email protocol stuff. I feel like building an index for your use case is totally achievable if so.