[rkhassen9]

Typically will use Gmail in the browser for sending and recieving emails…but for searching my Gmail, it’s Outlook, ironically, which works the best.

Don’t trust Outlook for other functions in Gmail reliably though. Or Calendar. Examples are things like double emails being sent and calendar updates being missed.

At our company a lot of people use Outlook to handle their Gmail functions and it’s quite problematic…but Outlook’s search is far superior.

So I think of the browser as the main interface and only use Outlook for search.

[dspillett]

> but for searching my Gmail, it’s Outlook, ironically, which works the best.

How bad I find the search in Outlook and Teams is one of the reasons I refuse to trust Bing. I know they are completely separate divisions, but still…

Both they and gmail have trouble finding someple words and sentence fragments that I know are in there and, worse, instead of just saying they can't find it they often return a bunch of useless stuff just-in-case I meant that instead.

I keep thinking of writing an IMAP->SQL interface¹ so I can search more manually that way. Or even just mapping to files in a filesystem² so I can find/grep/etc, though the DB option would also allow some more complex searches (search for X in messages that are replies to messages containing Y, for example).

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[1] Keeping mail on the mail server, but syncing it with a DB. This is more complicated than it would first sound as it will mean decoding MIME and various sub-encodings to extract the plain text so I can properly query it, hence that project is still on my “when hell freezes over so I have enough free time” list.

[2] Yeah, maildir and similar storage formats already do this, but there is still the unpacking/decoding issue before being able to directly search the text of many messages.

[rkhassen9]

>”How bad I find the search in Outlook and Teams is one of the reasons I refuse to trust Bing. I know they are completely separate divisions, but still…”

I wonder if you are referring to the online version of Outlook which is awful. And agreed regarding Teams…!

For clarity It’s the desktop imap version of Outlook with a local downloaded db that searches so well for us.