ios 7 Mail Search Problems

I have this problem too. Mac OSX Server and 15+ iOS devices as well and Mac clients. The old iPad 1's can search mail just fine - they will not upgrade to iOS7. Later iPad retina, iPhone 5 and any client with iOS7 cannot produce any useful search of the users mail files - incredibly slow, incomplete results, random order..... absolutely useless and with a Mac OSX server sitting behind it. What is going on? Apple need to sort this out as it is just plain embarrassing they cannot code a mail client to search a mail archive effectively.

angryiphoneuser wrote:

I have this problem too. Mac OSX Server and 15+ iOS devices as well and Mac clients. The old iPad 1's can search mail just fine - they will not upgrade to iOS7. Later iPad retina, iPhone 5 and any client with iOS7 cannot produce any useful search of the users mail files - incredibly slow, incomplete results, random order..... absolutely useless and with a Mac OSX server sitting behind it. What is going on? Apple need to sort this out as it is just plain embarrassing they cannot code a mail client to search a mail archive effectively.

For me (with MS Exchange mail server) the order isn't random, but is grouped, making the results look random if you don't realise. I've described what I think is the grouping order here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5333068?answerId=23695657022#23695657022

Can you please confirm whether you think the ordering is the same with a Mac OSX Server?

No - I don't think so. Interestingly the order seems slighlty different running exactly the same search, on the same mailbox, but using two different iOS7 devices. Repeated runs produces a slightly different order each time - it seems very strange.

The search function in the iOS7 mail app is unuseable. As I said before Apple developers should be really embarrassed with the appalling coding they have released here - it is not even worthy of a beta release.

Okay, so I had a ticket open on 11/6 with an Apple Account Security Senior Advisor that looked like it was going somewhere. The advisor let me know that he escalated to his engineering team and would keep me in the loop. However, after 11/13, the rep began to completely ignore my requests for updates. I even put him onto this thread to make sure he realized how many other people were experiencing the same problems. We need to escalate this issue if we ever want it to be resolved. Please call Apple Support and reference ticket number 527473700. Let them see how many of us are being negatively impacted by their faulty email searches and duplicate messages.

Has anyone else had a problem with doing a mail search with the letter "S"?

If I search with any other letter, it starts searching and allows me to keep entering letters to form a word. When I type S, it stops in its tracks and I cannot type any more letters.

When I type S in the search field, the iPad locks up the mail program and twice, the entire iPad froze. I updated from iOS 7.0.3 to 7.0.4, reset, hard reset, deleted my mail account and restored the iPad to factory settings. It still freezes.

I've had this less than a week and I'm about to return it.

-iPad Air 32GB 7.0.4-

Neonwater wrote:

Has anyone else had a problem with doing a mail search with the letter "S"?

No problems here when I type an S into the search box, and I haven't seen anything like that with any other searches I've done. Perhaps it has something to do with one of the hits it's returning when it starts searching for things starting with S.

Can you try entering S then another letter very quickly, to see if you can get the second letter types before it starts searching for just S?

What sort of mail server is involved here?

angryiphoneuser wrote:

No - I don't think so. Interestingly the order seems slighlty different running exactly the same search, on the same mailbox, but using two different iOS7 devices. Repeated runs produces a slightly different order each time - it seems very strange.

The search function in the iOS7 mail app is unuseable. As I said before Apple developers should be really embarrassed with the appalling coding they have released here - it is not even worthy of a beta release.

Is it possible that the two devices had loaded different amounts of old email? Perhaps it gives more weight to what it finds locally vs on the server. Not a good state of affairs if that's the case, because it's not likely to be helpful to anyone.

I've noticed that if you let it sit for a while, the order can change as it gradually finds more stuff. That might cause them to appear different too if you don't wait long enough.

I haven't got much hope of them giving us back the old search. I'm guessing they like this "universal" search and will use it everywhere. But they're going to have to tweak it if they don't want this thread to run forever. It's embarrassing enough that it made it into iOS7, but I can't belive it's still like this in 7.0.4.

After typing an "S" the app locks up. Quickly or slowly, you cannot enter any more letters. It shows "searching" and just spins. I've left it for an hour on one occasion and then 10 minutes on a second occasion thinking it had a lot to search through. I went through all the alphabet and only the letter S does this.

I'm using an iCloud mail server for a .mac mail.

I took it into the Apple store last night and they said they'd have to completely reinstall the software and they had never seen this odd behavior. Since I've only had this for a few days, they said just bring it back for an exchange on a nother new iPad.

I too miss the old way of being able to search to/from/ subject or all. Some people leave years of mail on their accounts and a general search could take a while. I only have about 500 messages so it's not too slow.

I just came across some mail searching tips (at http://www.redmondpie.com/tips-on-finding-long-lost-emails-in-ios-7-mail-app/). While they make no mention at all of the problems being discussed here, they mentioned some things that could help reduce the frustration.

You can add dates and attributes into the search. E.g.

jsmith october unread

will still show heaps of unwanted results, but at least those that were sent in October and are unread will appear at the top of the list. You can be more specific about the date, and you can specify read, unread, flagged, unflagged.

I read that you can use the word "attachment" in the search (in the Octber 2013 version of the iPhone manual!), but that's not working for me.

I also came across the suggestion that you can search for things like

subject: invoice

When I type that, emails with "invoice" in the subject line come up initially, but after a few seconds it adds more results that appear irrelevant.

i am having the same problems

i have an iphone5

1 aol mail account

1 me/apple mail account

1 gmail account

nothing in chronological order

search is ruined for me and i used to use this 10 times a day

i wrote apple and complained and referenced the above number

i am headed to the apple store this weekend to complain there also

iOS 7 mail search doesn't work for me at all. Often it produces no results at all, and when it does produce results they are completely random and inconsistent. For example, it will find a message from 2010, but not one that is currently in my inbox that I received earlier in the day. I can literally be *looking* at an email headline and then try to search for it and it will not find it in the results. Completely unacceptable and it is causing big problems with my workflow. I search for messages several times a day and now I am completely unable to find things.

I'm also suffering from this change to the Mail search app in iOS 7. All previous versions were just great -- you can knock down a complex search over a large inbox in a couple of quick iterations because you had control and knew what happened with each input.

Through a series of events I am in conversation with the internal Apple manager for the Mail app. I also happen to run my own email server with search engine and I can monitor the queries. So far I have gleaned a few bits of information.

1) Search results are grouped first, then listed in date order within each group. The groups in priority order are:

* Flagged

* From

* To/CC, Subject

* Body

2) When the match is on either the From or To field, a "pill" with that word shows up by the message summary to show that match.

3) When you type in a search phrase on your iDevice, it breaks the search down into one separate query per word and sends the query(ies) to the mail server asking for matches on any of the common fields (To, Cc, From, Subject) as well as in the body. In other words, if you type "bob jane party" it sends three separate search queries to the mail server asking for all messages that match "bob" in any field, "jane" in any field, and "party" in any field. The iDevice then organizes the search results from all three queries to conform with the order of result presentation above. (But note that the Bcc field is never requested to match.)

4) My own experiments show results that don't match the order in #1. There seems to be some kind of scoring being applied as well that is not (yet) described that seems to tweak results order beyond date order within a group.

5) The software manager also recommended using "attachment" as a search word if you are searching for an attachment, but like another poster above noted, it doesn't work. It's easy to see why: when the search query is sent to the email server, the word "attachment" is treated like any other search term; it doesn't match because, simply, it does not appear anywhere in the actual unformatted raw text of the message (which you can look at on a Mac or most other computers using Option-Command-U or similar on Thunderbird on PC).

I've given Apple feedback that the iOS 7 Mail search function is completely unusable. We (my wife, specifically, who is the power email searcher) has moved to AltaMail ($5) which is industrial strength -- lots of knobs and buttons and functionality, not very polished, but you have total control.

I highly recommend anyone with similar issues to voice their opinion at http://www.apple.com/feedback. Nobody at Apple reads this forum; complaining here does not go anywhere except other users.

Added info on "attachment" search word

mklein9 wrote:

4) My own experiments show results that don't match the order in #1. There seems to be some kind of scoring being applied as well that is not (yet) described that seems to tweak results order beyond date order within a group.

5) The software manager also recommended using "attachment" as a search word if you are searching for an attachment, but like another poster above noted, it doesn't work. It's easy to see why: when the search query is sent to the email server, the word "attachment" is treated like any other search term; it doesn't match because, simply, it does not appear anywhere in the actual unformatted raw text of the message (which you can look at on a Mac or most other computers using Option-Command-U or similar on Thunderbird on PC).

These points illustrate well a big part of the problem - the behaviour of the search funtion is largely undocumented, and some of what's documented is just wrong. If the person in charge of the app doesn't know how to use it, what hope do we have? If the app isn't going to be fixed soon, can we at least have some instructions for how to use it?

Hopefully your feedback to this manager is enough to prompt some action, but it's probably a good idea for everyone to submit feedback via the web form as you suggest. Maybe they use this to prioritise work.

Throwing my hat into the ring as well as far as the duplicate emails go on my ipad with latest ios. I only have about 20 emails in my inbox and if i search that folder only a couple come up without duplicates. Which is weird, since you would think that every email would have a duplicate. In any case, hard to explain that to end users that something is wrong with an Apple product, but here we are.

Just been to that feedback page and posted this against the iPad & iPhone page. Much good may it do...

Mail on iPad & iPhone has become virtually useless for business now the search functionality is so screwed up since upgrading to iOS 7.

It's a joke. I use search function every day on multiple mail accounts and I cannot believe search now cannot not even return a search in chronological order. It's an absolute disgrace.

If I need to search gmail now I have to log in to the web based gmail which is an utter pain.

Has ruined mail for me on iPhone and iPad.

Cannot believe apple are doing NOTHING about this despite the complaints from users all over apple support forums.