Title: I&#x27;m in the process of switching from Gmail (last 13 years) to Fastmail, and so far, am very happy with the transition.  I&#x27;m using forwarding at Gmail and a vacation message to let people know I received their email but now have a new email address.<p>Today I checked out Fastmail searching vs Gmail.  I&#x27;ve never liked Gmail search, because half the time it won&#x27;t find what I want.  I think this is because it can only search on whole words.<p>Fastmail also apparently indexes whole words, but it also allows a wildcard suffix (but not prefix) so it will find email containing &quot;Fastmail&quot; if I search for fast*, whereas Gmail won&#x27;t.  Yay!<p>It&#x27;s kinda funny to me that Gmail, run by the world&#x27;s largest search company, doesn&#x27;t actually do full-text search.  If I search for cuss and don&#x27;t get any matches, it seems reasonable to search for cuss* next and *cuss* as a last resort, to find &quot;discussion&quot;.  I know it&#x27;s not efficient to do that last one, but I just tested fgrep on a 1GB file and it took less than 4 seconds to search it.  So Google spending 12 seconds on a mail search (I have 3GB of mail, and yes, I know they probably don&#x27;t store it as a 3GB file) would be a lot nicer than me trying to manually hunt through email.<p>I&#x27;m guessing Gmail doesn&#x27;t even index words but uses &quot;interned&quot; word numbers, so searching for partial words is not even a possibility.<p>Gmail <i>will</i> spend about a minute searching for the word &quot;the&quot; in my mail, so spending around 12 seconds doing the equivalent of fgrep doesn&#x27;t seem too unreasonable.
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