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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

Startup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching.

Seriously, this is egregious. You rely on your email provider to accurately search your inbox - some emails are important business, tax, and legal documents that are relevant for years, even decades. Or at least be fucking transparent about the fact that you are not really searching all emails. I know Gmail is a free service and in the T&C you agreed to (figuratively) sell your soul but this has huge real-life implications.

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> Startup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching.

I don't mean to pick on you but picturing the perspective behind this comment is very funny and a little sad to me.

grep is almost 40 years old. It is free software, fast, and doesn't share your data with anyone. Small knowledge of the file structure of MIME enables more advanced search. This is all without mentioning desktop-based email clients.

Reading your comment, I can only picture some web-page javascript-based track-you-and-show-ads 15-employee company whom you give your email password so they can connect to another service and make high-latency queries on your behalf.

Shows how far we've come?

Firstly, that startup idea was an overt irony aimed at Google :). Secondly, my guess would be that maybe 0.001% of gmail users are familiar with command line interface and regular expressions. Not everybody is a coder and that is not necessarily bad.

Apple has the opposite problem. On my version of OSX, Spotlight searches in the Finder return email results too, which increases the noise-to-signal results dramatically. You can turn it off but this requires you to enter your search term as a formula every time--there's no way to make it the default. If I want to search my email, I'll switch to the Mail program and search there. I neither want nor need to search my mail in the Finder.

> I neither want nor need to search my mail in the Finder.

Just exclude Mail from Spotlight search in Settings.

Gmail is not just a free service; g-suite costs money, and if this affects corporate email this definitely has real world implications

If it does not affect corporate email, it does not have real world implications?

Not necessarily, he didn't say "if and only if"

Thunderbird (and I'm guessing most of the offline, true email clients) has this built-in.

It's funny, in discussions about webmail vs local email client, people often say "why would I want a local client anymore, webmail is all I need".

Well... this is why you might want it. Your data under your control. Your choice of tools.

If you're using GMail and Google decides to turn GMail to crap, well, bad luck.

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