Startup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching.
Seriously, this is egregious. You rely on your email provider to accurately search your inbox - some emails are important business, tax, and legal documents that are relevant for years, even decades. Or at least be fucking transparent about the fact that you are not really searching all emails. I know Gmail is a free service and in the T&C you agreed to (figuratively) sell your soul but this has huge real-life implications.
> Startup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching.
I don't mean to pick on you but picturing the perspective behind this comment is very funny and a little sad to me.
grep is almost 40 years old. It is free software, fast, and doesn't share your data with anyone. Small knowledge of the file structure of MIME enables more advanced search. This is all without mentioning desktop-based email clients.
Reading your comment, I can only picture some web-page javascript-based track-you-and-show-ads 15-employee company whom you give your email password so they can connect to another service and make high-latency queries on your behalf.
Firstly, that startup idea was an overt irony aimed at Google :). Secondly, my guess would be that maybe 0.001% of gmail users are familiar with command line interface and regular expressions. Not everybody is a coder and that is not necessarily bad.
Apple has the opposite problem. On my version of OSX, Spotlight searches in the Finder return email results too, which increases the noise-to-signal results dramatically. You can turn it off but this requires you to enter your search term as a formula every time--there's no way to make it the default. If I want to search my email, I'll switch to the Mail program and search there. I neither want nor need to search my mail in the Finder.
Seriously, this is egregious. You rely on your email provider to accurately search your inbox - some emails are important business, tax, and legal documents that are relevant for years, even decades. Or at least be fucking transparent about the fact that you are not really searching all emails. I know Gmail is a free service and in the T&C you agreed to (figuratively) sell your soul but this has huge real-life implications.