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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

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.

njovin 6y ago
Same here which is why I switched to using a desktop mail client that just wraps the Gmail web interface (there are a few out there). Gmail itself is pretty minimal (when you turn off a lot of the junk in settings) and this way I get the power of Gmail's native search along with nice desktop notifications.
- blissofbeing 6y ago
  You then might enjoy mimestream[1], I think of it as a native mac gmail client, no wrapper around gmail.com just using gmail APIs. 1: https://mimestream.com/ https://mimestream.com/
  - anderiv 6y ago
    I’ve been using Mimestream since the very early betas, and have grown to absolutely love it for its simplicity and performance. The developers are very responsive, and are iterating quite quickly to tighten up the client before stable release. I will absolute purchase a license when it’s out of beta.
ubermonkey 6y ago
When you say "mail.app" do you mean on a Mac? 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.
- mbreese 6y ago
  I think the difference is between mail stored locally versus remote Gmail. Mail.app’s Gmail searching is subpar compared to the main web interface. It’s probably not Mail.app’s fault, but that’s what keeps me using the web version as opposed to using Mail.app (for that account).
  - ubermonkey 6y ago
    Could be. I use a true IMAP server for personal mail and Exchange for corporate, and have it set up so I have a copy of all my mail locally, in part BECAUSE of the excellent search. 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.
atombender 6y ago
Mail has always been spotty, but Mail's search completely stopped working for me around the time I upgraded to Big Sur. 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.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  Ugh, by default Mail.app just searches in the current mailbox. When you start a search, on the top of the left sidebar, just above your list of mailboxes, a new “All Mailboxes” folder will appear. Click that to search the whole app. I don’t know why they did this. I don’t know who was asking for it.
  - atombender 6y ago
    It's an annoying change, I agree, but in my case that's not the problem. The search is just broken.

njovin 6y ago

Same here which is why I switched to using a desktop mail client that just wraps the Gmail web interface (there are a few out there). Gmail itself is pretty minimal (when you turn off a lot of the junk in settings) and this way I get the power of Gmail's native search along with nice desktop notifications.

blissofbeing 6y ago
You then might enjoy mimestream[1], I think of it as a native mac gmail client, no wrapper around gmail.com just using gmail APIs. 1: https://mimestream.com/ https://mimestream.com/
- anderiv 6y ago
  I’ve been using Mimestream since the very early betas, and have grown to absolutely love it for its simplicity and performance. The developers are very responsive, and are iterating quite quickly to tighten up the client before stable release. I will absolute purchase a license when it’s out of beta.

ubermonkey 6y ago

When you say "mail.app" do you mean on a Mac? 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.

mbreese 6y ago
I think the difference is between mail stored locally versus remote Gmail. Mail.app’s Gmail searching is subpar compared to the main web interface. It’s probably not Mail.app’s fault, but that’s what keeps me using the web version as opposed to using Mail.app (for that account).
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  Could be. I use a true IMAP server for personal mail and Exchange for corporate, and have it set up so I have a copy of all my mail locally, in part BECAUSE of the excellent search. 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.

atombender 6y ago

Mail has always been spotty, but Mail's search completely stopped working for me around the time I upgraded to Big Sur. 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.

kstrauser 6y ago
Ugh, by default Mail.app just searches in the current mailbox. When you start a search, on the top of the left sidebar, just above your list of mailboxes, a new “All Mailboxes” folder will appear. Click that to search the whole app. I don’t know why they did this. I don’t know who was asking for it.
- atombender 6y ago
  It's an annoying change, I agree, but in my case that's not the problem. The search is just broken.