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> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.

How long do you imagine it takes to fully index 100 emails? 1000? It's likely under a minute even for 10,000. And it's work that's only done once, they don't need to rebuild the entire index every time a new email is added. They absolutely could (and should if they don't already) index all locally downloaded e-mails. It's bonkers not to do it.

> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device

Doesn't this feel like a perfect example of work done at 3AM when plugged in and (importantly) after the battery is fully charged? It won't be perfect, searching for an email in the afternoon that you received in the morning won't be in the index, but I generally don't need search for emails I received so recently anyways

My ActiveSync app does server side search using server side indexes just fine.

I don't know the other servers well but Dovecot has good SEARCH support.

Historically that hasn't been my experience, but it looks like that's because I never enabled the Solr-based Full-Text Search! Thanks for mentioning this, as I'm going to turn this on right away:

https://doc.dovecot.org/2.3/configuration_manual/fts/