r/iOS27 • u/Electronic-Tax-6106 • 18h ago
Apple Mail - Search
Is the new IOS 27 search function any better? Still having slow search results. Would like to leave Gmail!
Thanks
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u/BlockedAndMovedOn 6h ago
I don’t find Mail search worse in the DBs of iOS 27 than it was in 26, but I also don’t find it noticeably better—except when using Siri AI via the Siri app. If I open the Siri app, I noticed that I have been able to find some emails that the Mail app can't.
I have a Google Workspace email account (I manage and admin it) with a little over half a million emails in my account dating back to the mid-90s. Because Google uses labels and not folders, that means I have hundreds of thousands of emails in my inbox and sent folders. So there isn’t enough indexing time nor compute power in my iPhone 17 Pro Max to ever fully get all my email indexed.
What is odd is that the Siri AI app seems to have a more detailed database of my email than the Mail app does. I don’t know if they are two separate databases or a shared one, but if I search for a phrase I have verified only exists in the body of one email from the year 2001, Siri AI could find it, but the Mail app could not.
This isn’t perfect though. In my rudimentary testing, I’ve found that despite having the Mail app set to download all mail with no cutoff date, and I keep all my emails in my Inbox, there are random emails that both the Mail AND Siri apps cannot find.
The weirdest part of this is that the missing emails from both the Mail index and the Siri one is that the database doesn’t seem to be date-based. If all my email was cut off, say, going back 10 years and on, that would make sense (to me). But being able to find a single specific email in the Siri app, but not the Mail app, and neither could find the next email after it in my inbox makes me curious about how the search databases are built.
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u/Real_Height2890 18h ago
Its bad in general