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I seem to be the only person in the world whose email is only broken since forced to use GMail on a work account (and Thunderbird totally fails at using the IMAP thing).

I mean, searching for "vpn" doesn't give me the mail that contains "openvpn"? Or it's that incompatible to my workflow that not even RTFM works...

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Search is hilariously bad in all email clients, including gmail. Google managed to solve searching on the web by just throwing enough information in it until you kinda always got what you wanted to know. But that doesn't work for email, because there just isn't more info to throw at it than what's in your mailbox. You need to actually have decent search algorithms. And those are apparently too difficult to write, since not a single mail client out there does it right. Grep does a better job.

Not all email clients.

http://notmuchmail.org/

Thanks for mentioning that. I use notmuch and the emacs mode for my email. It's absolutely the best email experience I've ever had.

I bet I could find plenty of people that would consider search to be broken if searching for vpn did return openvpn results. (Or the slightly less loaded example, if searching for 'man' returned results with 'almanac'.)

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