Gmail produces by far the best search results for me (comparing to apple mail and thunderbird) and makes me reach for it regularly for search alone, which I find pretty annoying. If there is anything better out there I am all ears.
> If there is anything better out there I am all ears.
Mutt, Pine, grep, awk, etc. I don't understand why throwing a GUI interface on top automatically seems to make email search absolutely awful, this includes Gmail. I so often need to find a specific old email using a hazy match criteria that I am half tempted to pipe my email into Splunk (I run a small Splunk cluster at home for other needs) and use it (as then I don't need a local copy of every email on all devices or to need to SSH into a central box to do a TUI based search)
So gmail search box allows you to find an email based on email header data? ;)
Sure, gmail search works "ok" when you are searching based on a word in the email or the sender/recipient email. Things more advanced than that it really falls short.
I usually have better luck with the "autocomplete" results in gmail search than with the actual search results. I don't even know how you manage to screw up your core competency that badly.