[cdmckay]

I really wanted to switch to the Proton stack and even tried it for a couple weeks but the search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets. I had to switch back to Google Workspace.

It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.

[utopiah]

> search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets.

Not sure if it's related but

  Proton does not hold your unencrypted email body content

consequently only you do once you are logged in. Thus you can't have server side search on your email content, only on email title. What you can have though is client side full-text search on body content. For that you have to enable it via the search box, details https://proton.me/support/search-message-content

It's not perfect but obviously it's a LOT more than searching only on titles.

[petcat]

Protons email encryption is mostly snakeoil and marketing. Their guarantees of strict encryption at rest is really only relevant to a certain class of people with a very specific threat model. Everyone else that uses the service is just leaking plain text email with everyone they converse with who uses a service that does not offer the same encryption guarantees.

So basically they sacrifice a usable search function for a security service that isn't relevant to 99% of people and isn't even effective half the time.

[utopiah]

> mostly snakeoil and marketing

FUD much? Snakeoil would be false claims. There are plenty of problems with Proton but AFAIK not genuinely encrypting customer data is not one of them. If you do have examples please do share.

Marketing that might not address the average user who still get in touch with people relying on surveillance capitalism like GMail address sure but bundling both as one is dishonest IMHO.

[cdmckay]

Yeah I tried it and it was still unusable. I barely noticed any improvement.

[wolvoleo]

Outlook online (I have M365 business basic) search sucks just as much. It finds really recent emails and ones from years ago but nothing in between for some reason.

The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365.

But anyway my point is even supposedly premium services screw this up.

[andrehacker]

>> The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows.

I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s).

Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better.

edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.

[lostlogin]

> I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding

Have a look at Word. The app, the web version, the Teams versions. Try editing in one and then opening in another - they aren’t even compatible. It’s such a nasty swamp.

[wolvoleo]

Yes Mac is the exception. They still have a real app there. On windows they're discontinuing the real app for an electron one (or Webview2 as they call that)

It's unfortunately just a webview to their cloud outlook. If you have an account that's not with Microsoft they will pull your entire mailbox into their cloud (though they don't charge for it). Just pulling directly from another mailserver is something they don't care about.

I'm surprised the search is so bad on Mac too. But spotlight has degraded a lot. When it first arrived in tiger it was great but when I was last on Mac 3 years ago it was indeed pretty bad.

[lostlogin]

> the search in Proton Mail is so bad

Have you tried Apple Mail? I’d be interested to hear if it’s worse than that.

I use it, the search is very bad.

[cyberpunk]

I use the bridge and a real mail client with proton and the search is fine. You can even hook the bridge into tailscale, so it works across my devices with a real mail client also (e.g phones tablets etc).

The desktop client is rubbish, though, agreed.

[Spooky23]

Apple Mail the client or the web?

Apple Mail.app is the fastest search available. I use it with o365 specifically for search.

[lostlogin]

The app. With MS365 I get terrible search results. And worse, my work email has access to some shared accounts which I can’t access from Apple mail as 2FA will only work for the primary account.

[general1465]

I am using paid version of Proton Mail and search is working in thunderbird connected to their IMAP/SMTP bridge just alright. But web interface may suck, I did not use the web for a long time.

[mschild]

The web search feature isnt great. With the bridge youre unecrypting the emails and letting Thunderbird have full access so its as good as whatever Thunderbird (or other programs) have implemented.

Proton websearch is by default email title, sender/receiver only. You can enable full body search but Proton will download your emails to your browser so the search is local. They dont support server-side body search. If you have thousands of emails, youll need to download those first.

[kachapopopow]

this is a soft case of "you're using it wrong/didn't read what proton mail is" they physically cannot offer you this functionality even if they really wanted to. Although you can enable message body search and it has to be indexed on your client (which takes a long time and is a pretty bad UX - but there is no alternative).

Instead (and this is the suggested way) you can link it to an email client which stores emails on device unencrypted using proton mail bridge. They could pre-load all content in your browser, but again it's pretty bad UX and you would sit there wondering why the search takes 1-2 minutes on a fresh window session if it was on "by default". You *can* use automatic tagging for assisted search (like "if contains flight, add flight tag") though if you want to continue exclusively using the web app(s).

But there is a pretty valid concern here: why don't the native iOS and android apps have an email index?! I guess they don't want to be caught "storing" your emails unencrypted? I don't know - should really be an option.

[omnimus]

Proton is ok to meh - great marketing though. Try Infomaniak instead.

[abc123abc123]

I've been a happy infomaniak customer for many years. They only had 1 or 2 outtages that lasted more than 1 day during all this time.

They are on my watch list however. The CEO is pro-surveillance, but was forced to back down due to the outrage of their customers, but he seems to be ethically quite questionable. But for the moment, I think they do a good job, but they should change their CEO to someone who unquestionably is against surveillance.