The reason search is slow on your computer is just that the app doesn't use the right kind of index, or maybe no index, for whatever reason. I can index hundreds of gigabytes of text on my laptop and have full text search take a couple milliseconds.

The problem is mail servers. They usually don't support search this way, so the client has to download or cache each message to do the search. Gmail gets around this by having their own protocol and the indexes ready.

IMAP does support server-side full-text search of bodies. (In mutt, this is invoked with the =b operator of the l command.) Amusingly enough, this works well with real mail servers like dovecot, but it seems to sometimes miss matches with gmail, because gmail's indexes aren't very good.

The more you know, thanks!

Have you actually tried search on Thunderbird?

The quick filter finds messages in seconds in a folder with > 10000 mails. Not instantaneous, but not forever.

The global search is instantaneous because Thunderbird indexes the mails.

Not having to rely on the Internet to find your stuff is a feature, not a bug.

But then my search is not powered by the cloud!

Snark aside, I sometimes feel like we reinvent the wheel using new technologies just because we like the new hotness.

I see the OS battles take place and my only thought is..at work, I want an OS that: Boots and then gets the hell out of my way so I can do my work. I don't want it to try and sell me things or re-arrange things or have to spend time tinkering or fixing it.

Now in my free time, sure! I set up a computer with pass thorough GPU so I can game in Windows while running Linux. It was fun and a learning experience.

In apple mail, I can search all my mailboxes for all my accounts in one search and it's pretty much instantaneous. Most of my email accounts are hosted in gmail, but I generally use Apple Mail to access them (the only times I go into the web interface is for the account I use for submitting writing where I apply multiple tags to each message indicating publication/piece submitted/response type or to clean out the spam folder since I worry a little that if I delete messages from Apple Mail I might be inadvertently telling gmail that the spam wasn't actually spam).

I have a few GB of mail folders. I can search them more or less instantaneous, using Kontact (KMail).

Full-text indexing isn't dark magic at all.

I guess we have different requirements of scale. My gmail is over 300GB (one of the reasons I have a Google 1 subscription).

Ever considered to archive parts of it? I have difficulties to believe all of that is currently needed mail. (I know, it piles up over the years! :-))

Also most of it will be likely some bloat form HTML mail and attachments (especially with their inefficient encodings).

My point was: Handling full-text search indices over even dozens of GB of plain text isn't anything a mediocre computer couldn't handle nowadays.