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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

The engineer in me loves the promised End-End encryption and all the cool stuff. But, the inconvenience of "unable to search contents of emails" is a deal breaker towards encrypted email for me. My primary concern was Google/Microsoft scraping my emails to build a profile of me. My emails could give away very personal information that I do not want to be used for advertising.

My money finally went to Fastmail. Excellent email service - just works and doesn't try to be super smart and take over the world.

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Didn't Google stop scanning Gmail for ads targeting?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

They still scan email for product features. Travel receipts for things like "my flights" & Google Now, etc

More importantly they give any government agency free access without any warrant to fulltext search any customer.

US law interpretation of IMAP. Only with a POP3 service you are safe.

"Without any warrant": what do you mean?

Under the Stored Communications Act, law enforcement may get emails or other information under third party control with only a subpoena.

Retrieving email via the POP3 protocol typically deletes the email upon retrieval, making it impossible for the third party to comply with requests for already-retrieved emails.

>POP3 protocol typically deletes the email upon retrieval

What POP3 client are you using that does this? I've not seen it before. It gets marked as read but that's it.

Geez, Eudora? Outlook Express maybe? I haven’t used POP3 in a decade.

It used to delete from the server after downloading locally. This was when most email mailboxes had a capacity of 10MB.

I'm writing something that uses POP3 right now and thankfully it doesn't delete anything. I'd have to do things a lot differently if that were the case

So you think google storage systems work like your normal filesystem?

You don’t think that files can be deleted from a Google file system? Does gmail even store email like that, in flat files?

They can be but not instantaneously, because of multiple replicated copies in a distributed environment.

Source?

all of the news about how the 3-letter agencies operate from the last decade

Only for business users (i.e. custom Google Apps domains)

G Suite (former Google Apps) has a different Terms of Use compared with Google's user oriented products, like Gmail.com, otherwise usage wouldn't fly in most big companies, especially in Europe.

In general, if you aren't paying, then you're the product.

You can totally search email contents with ProtonMail -- it just does it clientside. I just tested with my 125MB of emails and it was fast (under 1s) but maybe if you have more emails it could be slower.

Have you tried searching for a keyword that is only in the content of the email and NOT on the subject? I tried even now. It doesn’t work for me.

I have: It works.

I'm curious how? This FAQ page on their site claims you cannot search email contents, although they plan to support that in their upcoming Protonmail Bridge (which works with a desktop client to search locally): https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/search/

That is what I'd expect, since obviously they cannot build a search index over text they cannot read. Transferring the entire contents of your emails to your web browser to search locally would be slow and impractical on anything but a very fast connection.

+1 for fastmail just works. good support, clean and fast web interface, plays nicely with mbsync + mutt. identities feature is a nice bonus.

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