Ask HN: Is there a service to index and search Gmail? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a service to index and search Gmail?

1 pointOhMeadhbh9 comments

I just noticed GMail doesn't do search anymore. Or rather, they do some weird partial search. I'm trying to get the +4 and other details for my mom's new address and I know it's in an email I sent two years ago, but no amount of searching can find it. Disturbingly, the subject line of the message shows up, but I can't get the body.

I supposed I could do takeout and then just grep through the messages for the part of the message I remember. But that seems like overkill.

Is there a service out there that will index mail messages sent to/from gmail and allow you to search them? That would be a cool product.

The obvious solution is to call my mom, but I don't want to admit I didn't write her address down (instead assuming gmail would maintain it.)

Ha! I eventually found the +4 on Amazon. I sent her a house warming gift a couple years ago and Amazon held onto the address. I don't know if I'm pleased or frightened that every address I've sent things to i still there.

I haven't heard the phrase "+4" before. Is that the USA postcode format? (ZIP Code+4)

Yup.

Like a third-party service to index it?

Sure! What's your email and password? I'll help you.

Sure, it's 14M4L33TH4XX0R.

Thanks.... Proceeding to index now.

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Update: Sorry, couldn't find it either.

At least you tried. Thank you, random hacker.

Superhuman?

mmm... I think the problem is GMail's moved from "normal" indexing to "AI" indexing. I don't have a lot of faith in someone else's LLM being able to search my gmail inbox any better. What I really want to do is to give the index a search string and have it tell me which messages that string appears in. I don't need it to evaluate the message content and give me a list of messages it thinks are related.

I'm in the process of requesting takeout so I can get the messages in a text format so I can wash them with various unix utilities to generate the appropriate indexes.

I'm only interested in doing this for messages into and out of my account. I'm not building a service for other people to use, and disk space is cheap, so I can afford for my index to be less space efficient than most people might prefer.

Thanks for the recommendation, though. I'm pretty sure Superhuman isn't what I'm looking for, but I'll look at them anyway.

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