I agree regarding the convenience, but I'm not impressed at all by the Gmail search function. It doesn't even have any fuzzy matching – which seems crazy given what company we're talking about.

Gmail search is without doubt the worst search I've ever come across. It doesn't even return all the results.

Why do you think it is good?

There is nothing that says that you can't have both web and native mail clients.

It works for almost everything I try to find. It might take a few tries, but I can usually find the mail I was looking for.

Usually when I change jobs I have had another non Gmail account but I have never found the search as good. I have an outlook web client at work and that doesn't find things. Maybe its me being dumb and remembering different phrases from what is actually stored, but I almost always manage to finds what i am looking for in Gmail. I can't say the same with other clients.

Its just a pity that I have to give up my privacy to Google for it.

Well, it can't even find all instances of a single exact ID.

It's what you'd expect of a cloud service though, they really don't want to go through all of that data.

Any native client though will just go at it and return proper results.

Mobile Imap clients are a thing.

And gmail isn't your mail, it's Google's mail. A mailserver that you host yourself is your mail.

This is often heard but I don't think there is legal justification for it. It is pretty clear that it is your data, hosted on someone else's server that you pay by looking at ads and allowing them to read your mail. It is your mail nevertheless.

Additionally, if we are really picky, only mail written by you is your mail. All mail received is normally copyrighted by someone else and belongs to the sender or/and his/her company. Very strictly speaking in some countries you are not legally allowed to forward someone else's mail if it bears any artistic value.

Yes I know, it is off topic. But it was fun, thanks for the spark!

> All mail received is normally copyrighted by someone else and belongs to the sender or/and his/her company

Source please? Shouldn't there be a creative aspect about it? Which is probably not the case for lots of emails.

Correct, that's why I wrote this at the end if the paragraph:

>[...] if it bears any artistic value.

Source: As this depends on the country you live in you would have to look up your country's copyright law and see if it's true for your country.

Using a native email client 99% of the time doesn't prevent you from signing in to a web version when you're away from your machine...