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Maybe I'm just bad at email searching, but I've found having a large corpus just means my search results get severely diluted. If I have to recall exact phrase
by nirvdrum 12y ago
Maybe I'm just bad at email searching, but I've found having a large corpus just means my search results get severely diluted. If I have to recall exact phrases from emails to get meaningful results, then search has largely failed me.
- cortesoft 12y agoWhat email client do you use? I am sure that has a big effect on your results.
- nirvdrum 12y agoI used to use Gmail and never could get search to work well in it. IIRC, it wouldn't even stem words properly. I hope that's changed since. Nowadays I use FastMail and its search is pretty good. But unlike Web search engines which tailor results based upon your history, email search is pretty naive even though I usually have a precise context in mind.
- petercooper 12y agoI tend to just use words and names. So if it's a contract I had with SomeCorp, I'll search SomeCorp contract. If that has too many results, I'll use the operators to scope it to a certain date or a certain sender, etc. I'm not sure I've ever searched for a phrase in email, it's always the "context" around what I'm looking for instead (a bit like regular Web searching). Gmail is particularly good at that though compared to normal clients.