I’m a mail.app user and enjoy minimal email client interfaces. Problem is, for large inboxes, I find mail.app’s search very inadequate. More often than not I’m opening gmail’s web app to find what I’m looking for.
Because I have some pretty large mailboxes on my Mac, and Mail.app searches/indexes them like a champ. The search, in fact, is what KEEPS me on Mail.app -- it would be way more convenient for me professionally to surrender to Outlook, and Mac Outlook is really not bad, but holy hell is Outlook's search GARBAGE compared to the Mac client.
The frequent example is pretty crazy. I work for a small software company. We have a low-cost product that we sell that uses actual license keys we have to generate. The task of actually generating those keys, and thus doing the formal "this is your delivery" emails, falls to me b/c it involves SQL. Takes 2 minutes, so nobody wants to spend the time writing a front end for it, etc. Familiar story I'm sure.
Anyway, so I send out the fulfillment mails. Boss always gets a copy. They always have a PO number in the subject line. He'll search his Outlook, and VERY VERY OFTEN Outlook can't find it. I'll search MY mail in Mail.app, and can forward it back to him in seconds. I've watched him do it. I've duplicated the failure myself -- I have true-blue Outlook running in a VM, bc sometimes you need it for calendar stuff -- and it just plain fails. A LOT.
It sure seems like "search" would be an important part of a good email client, but Microsoft appears to disagree.
Currently, it finds only a few random scraps and doesn't search the entire mailbox. Spotlight still works; searching by the text in Spotlight shows a match, but clicking on the match (to open it in Mail) does nothing. I've tried rebuilding the mailbox and I've tried wiping the entire Mail directory; nothing works. Apparently other people have the same issue, but I haven't found a solution.
This is too bad, because Mail.app is probably the most functional, no-nonsense client for macOS. I've tried some others (Airmail, Spark, Polymail, etc.), but they have a lot of usability issues and weird features (like Sparrow's team support) that are irrelevant to me.
I don’t know why they did this. I don’t know who was asking for it.
I will absolute purchase a license when it’s out of beta.