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Comment by setopt | Hacker News Reader

It depends on your provider, unfortunately. If you use their iCloud mail service, search works fine – it appears to have some way to do server-side search for their own email.

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IMAP is a horrifically insufficient protocol. Literally every mail provider just implements their own custom JSON protocol to use with their own proprietary apps. Fastmail created JMAP which was meant to be an open source standard but so far only Fastmail uses it so it's just another provider specific protocol and client.

I do think 2027 might be the year that JMAP finally gets wider adoption! Between Thunderbird using Stalwart for their hosted product, and the fact that the new agentic tools are very good at writing JMAP integrations, I expect plenty of much better JMAP tooling.

I'm also close to a much more releasable version of the proxy which was first written back in 2014: https://github.com/jmapio/jmap-perl/ -- which can wrap existing IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV/Submission infrastructure so you can access it via JMAP.

I use icloud and this does not match my experience ... apple mail search has been insufficient on ios and macos for 15 years or more at this point ...

I use icloud also and concur. Search in Apple Mail is poor.

Not sure what the difference is then. I use iCloud Mail and didn’t have problems with search on iOS or MacOS, I did however have plenty of issues with search when syncing my work Outlook email via Mail.app, so I assumed there was something special about iCloud (similarly to how Mail.app offers push email only for iCloud and FastMail). I’ve imported decades of email into my account so it’s not about a small email volume either.

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