Hacker News Reader

Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care.

Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right.

Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bare hostname, still 0 finds (when searching all mailboxes, including body).

Maybe its some exchange settings, who knows, who cares. Pissed off fighting such basic tech instead of doing actual work.

View on HN

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways.

It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...

I think search has been deprecated in general because it gives the user too much control over the output. Through search, people can quickly find what they are looking for, which is bad. The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be.

I have to assume that Outlook email searches have already been set up to have ads injected into them, when/if one day Microsoft decides to flip the switch. Actually, I'm so out of touch with Windows they might already be doing this.

> The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be

The airport approach to computing!

Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.

I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.

Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.

As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse.

Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.

I’d be happy if it catered to exactly one edge case: ”Show me all emails that contain this word”

…which is the problem I was referring to: by optimising for that—your—use case, those of other people will invariably suffer.

We only have a single text field as the input; how are we supposed to guess whether you want to find an exact match of the phrase, a fuzzy match, at least one of the words provided, or any other possible variation? Also, are you interested in the content, the subject, the recipient, the sender address you used, a header field, an attachment, what have you? Do you want them ranked by the frequency of the word, or the position from the start of the text? Does it count those occurrences in quoted passages of previous mails downthread multiple times? What if it’s a stop word?

There are of course sensible ranking solutions and heuristics for these questions. I just want to highlight it’s not as trivial as it first sounds. Most mail clients probably don’t ship with a Lucene index—while they should.

You could always... you know... ask?

I use Thunderbird and it's approximately 100x better at searching for emails than Excel. I just tell it if I'm looking in the subject, in the body, in the sender, whether it's fuzzy, etc, and then it pulls up the emails.

Whereas Excel doesn't ask shit and, in return, doesn't have a working search.

Outlook on the other hand has an extremely powerful search

Having only a single box is a fully self-imposed leg wound

The answer, as always is Emacs :-)

With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems that require the OATH2 dance.

Haha, I love your reply because it brings up auth. You can't do the slightest search or action without first pinging a web server with an auth token. Yet another source of wasting milliseconds.

Have to make it bad so when they inevitably force AI into it, it looks amazing.

I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!

Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes, glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.

I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much greener back then, I just had lower standards.

I mean, it was common knowledge even back then that Outlook Express etc was far from the best email client. That's why people used alternatives, so much so that some of them were paid and yet had enough people buying them to remain in business - e.g. The Bat!

> and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all.

Can't really blame the devs though because very often they only had single threads and definitely single cores to work with.

Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.

What’s infuriating is, `find` and `grep` are snappy, they find everything you need in microseconds per gigabyte, and they have no index!

If the macOS or Windows searches were just wrappers for find/grep, it would already be an improvement!

IIRC, VSCode packages a rg binary and uses it for search.

Probably explains why it's something that works well and works fast.

On KDE systems, we have baloo which forms a filesystem index for universal (spotlight-like) search. It's very, very fast and the ranking algorithm for krunner is quite good. I think commercial software should have no issue matching this.

> Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable.

Which is maddening because back when it was released on Tiger it was great, and on spinning disks.

I've given on on macos' mail app too, mailspring isn't perfect but I had mail crash and lose my emails and I couldn't have that happen again. never been an issue with mailspring

Wouldn’t the server always have your mail?

Not in the old days of the POP3 protocol, as opposed to today's IMAP.

Strong agree. Wrote a blog post about it here:

https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction

We're building an IMAP-primitive, cross-platform, multi-account email client that is single-digit-ms fast in terms of search.

Do you really have trouble with Mail.app search? Because I find it STARKLY better than Outlook.

Granted, creating any kind of complex multi-clause query is a pain, but for simple searches it never lets me down whereas Outlook often just fails to find things I know are present.

As an update, I found that some of my issues were due to some bug in FileVault. My Spotlight would seemingly stop working altogether. The only solution was to toggle FileVault off/on.

I am using my mac with an LDAP (AD) user account, so I am possibly in the minority of people here.

Yeah the Outlook search function is... exotic.

It's so annoying when I KNOW I sent an email to someone a year ago and I put TO: Their name and it still doesn't come up.

Also: Smart folders still don't exist (e.g. a folder that automatically lists every email with a flag on it or some other condition). At least not in the "New Outlook" which we have to use at work. Apple had this back in 2007.

Same with OneNote by the way and the web version can't even search in whole notebooks, just single folders.

We are a small software company.

We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy.

SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a specific PO number or software serial number).

I find it immediately. Outlook strikes out. How do you break search so badly?

Yeah it's because Mac Mail downloads every single email and indexes it locally. Outlook (especially the new one) is just electron-based webmail. So every search happens in the cloud and it doesn't have a full copy of all your emails.

This would not be a problem for searching of course, if the cloud-based search worked properly. But yeah... About that. :X

The "classic" outlook should do it better but it also doesn't in my experience. Though I can't use it anymore at work lately.

It's just so bad because how can they screw this up? It's not some fluff feature, it's a core feature in an email client.

PS: If you have copilot, it does a lot better at finding stuff somehow, though like every AI it can be a bit hit and miss.

AI in search is just evil, something either exists or it doesn't, maybe on a Tuesday isn't good enough.

Well I have mixed feelings about it.

For general searches, I agree. I want those to be highly deterministic. But in that case I need to know exactly what I'm looking for.

There's also the other kind of thing though. "Who was that guy that I emailed with a year or two ago about this issue with MacBook Enrolment?". Yes I can filter by company or other details if I remember those things but sometimes I don't. And that's when AI search can really shine. Or not, it can also totally make up stuff out of its ass. But at least when it comes to emails that's easily verifiable.

I can see the usefulness.

But I'm already sick and tired of search not returning stuff I know is in there, because I forgot to check the blessed combination of boxes.

He's running full Outlook, not the shitty new one. And anyway this problem has existed for 10 years.

At that point i would switch to thunderbird or something

It's really a PITA to use standard protocols on M365 now though. They try to make it as difficult as possible. And you need lots of exceptions from your admins. Everything is "legacy", the Microsoft word for Not Invented Here and they make it sound like something super dangerous.

Of course that third party clients don't give them any telemetry, "insights", cross-marketing opportunities like copilot, has nothing to do with it.

How bad the search features in outlook and teams are, is part of the reason I don't bother trying Bing. If you can't get local search right, global search is going to suck too.

They are completely unrelated teams (or at least used to). Might as well be different companies.

Aye, I was being at least a little facetious. The team of indexing global content is quite different to that of searching my local mail and chat logs. The various "English language search" features attempted for SQL Server are different again.

But they are still all search functions, and the Outlook & Teams search functions seem so terrible that you'd think they'd try do something about it to support the pubic view of their other search related efforts.

Only half a century after the creation of grep

Reply on news.ycombinator.com