Fastmail search is better than Gmail
Today I checked out Fastmail searching vs Gmail. I've never liked Gmail search, because half the time it won't find what I want. I think this is because it can only search on whole words.
Fastmail also apparently indexes whole words, but it also allows a wildcard suffix (but not prefix) so it will find email containing "Fastmail" if I search for fast*, whereas Gmail won't. Yay!
It's kinda funny to me that Gmail, run by the world's largest search company, doesn't actually do full-text search. If I search for cuss and don't get any matches, it seems reasonable to search for cuss* next and *cuss* as a last resort, to find "discussion". I know it's not efficient to do that last one, but I just tested fgrep on a 1GB file and it took less than 4 seconds to search it. So Google spending 12 seconds on a mail search (I have 3GB of mail, and yes, I know they probably don't store it as a 3GB file) would be a lot nicer than me trying to manually hunt through email.
I'm guessing Gmail doesn't even index words but uses "interned" word numbers, so searching for partial words is not even a possibility.
Gmail will spend about a minute searching for the word "the" in my mail, so spending around 12 seconds doing the equivalent of fgrep doesn't seem too unreasonable.
17 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 59.5 ms ] threadI use Fastmail and I'm generally pleased with their search as well. It hasn't failed me yet.
There are a lot of opportunities for a better search engines but very little incentive invest into making it so.
I’m unable to sync only manually created contacts via carddav. If I sync contacts to my phone, I get every automatically created contact also showing in my contact list, which is basically anyone I’ve ever sent an email reply to.
Somehow Gmail handles this - I think they simply exclude the auto created group from being exported. I asked Fastmail support about this and there is nothing in the works to allow it.
I hope someone from Fastmail has a fix coming for this, or some other suggestion.
2 years ago they annoyed me by changing the ui and requiring an additional password entry to create a new alias. They also put the paid additional user above new alias.
Here's hoping they don't keep trying to fix things which are already perfect!
As much as I have a love/hate relationship with Google, they probably have some of the world's best security experts making sure Gmail is secure. Their entire reputation is at stake.
But I can't imagine a smaller email provider Fastmail has the a security team reading CVEs all day and running security audits line-by-line, which I'm sure Google has.
So maybe Fastmail for business email, but not personal email?
GMail does not.
About the only thing I liked about Yahoo mail was its built-in blocking feature, which apparently used Sieve without any tap dancing needed. All you had to do was pick an email address to block, block it, and that was it - you'd never get _anything_ from that sender again, and the sender wouldn't know that they'd been blocked, so they wouldn't be tempted to try another route.
But GMail? Duhhh, nope.
This is provably not true. Gmail supports stemming. If you search for [subject:does], you'll get plenty of emails with just "do" in the subject. Same with singulars/plurals.
It used to be supported in the early years, then it was dropped (either too expensive or a limitation of a new backend) and finally it was brought back after another backend rewrite 8-9 years ago.
If you really want wildcards, though, stemming won't cut it.