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.