Do you realize how incredibly stressful it is when traveling and you need to pull up a reservation in the moment and can't find it? I star everything I could ever possibly need out of the fear of never being able to find it again!

I check the product blog every few months in the hope this has been prioritized :(

Search need improvement. It is just ok in the web app, but it is terrible in android app. Please fix it.

I honestly cannot understand how basic search based on subject, sender, receiver etc. plus AND, OR, NOT syntax is not a thing yet in PM in 2025. Great that we can now (sometimes if the stars align) search body content, but without something that offers at least what gmail does, I can't use the web interface to find anything.

Is a key aspect of protonmail users not that they are pretty technical - how about giving us a really powerful search syntax + some UI magic to make it easy?

The poor search ability of PM is why I will not fully switch over.

Hi folks, I am also finding myself very challenged by the search. Email Volume is so intense these days, search is critical to being able to make use of it. It's a long-taught principle of organizers that the problem with filing and re-finding things is that the context when you're filing is often not the same as the context when you're searching and it can be hard to remember where you filed something.

SPECIFIC ISSUE: I can't seem to put two different words into search and have it find all the mails that have both those words. This critically impacts the usability of email for me.

@Proton: it's kinda cool you are trying to be the Google all things for Privacy.

But pretty please, first: **Fix Mail. Fix Search**.

Google did not start with all products. They made Gmail, and Gmail's search IS AWESOME. Proton's mail search is kinda horrible. Privacy cannot mean bad UX.

Problems:
* Searching is SO SLOW
* Advanced search is so limited (no operators, no search for attachments, the list goes on)
* Advanced search is confusing (e.g. "from" is used for the date, whereas every other email app uses that field to mean "sender"

PRETTY PLEASE MAKE PROTON MAIL SEARCH AWESOME 🙏

I still experience issues in search. Items just won’t appear when searched for it. At the moment I’m overthinking of stepping back to my old self hosted solution, just because of the lack of quality of the search function in email and calendar.

The lack of basic boolean operators is pretty galling too.

Search based on Labels as well.

I totally agree that current search feature is quite useless. I can't do even simple things such as "find emails from x containing attachment". Browsing through many results is hard and time consuming.

I'm with all the below. I'm seeing new applications and features being deployed constantly, but am waiting for the search function to improve like century's now.

It's way to often that I search for a phrase or a sender and nothing comes up. And then when finding the e-mail manually it shows op like it already should have in the search.

For me actually the same applies as X mentions: If the overall e-mail funtionality does not improve really quickly, it is pretty sure that I'll leave Proton. I've migrated my complete family because of e-mail, drive and pass. Expecting it to work properly. Not for a wallet and other stuff that I don't need.

Proton keeps adding apps..., but all I want is a **good mail client**, with **GOOD SEARCH**.

Please fix these problems:
* Searching is freakingly SLOW, specially if the body is indexed
* No standard field names can be used for searching (like the OP said)
* The list of search results is terrible, breaking up conversations into single emails that I need to click one by one

I might unsubscribe from Proton altogether if SEARCH does not improve.

Please please please make standard search syntaxes part of this. I should be able to search from:”George” and have it return all emails with George in the sender’s name or email, and I should be able to string it together with from:George to:Jess subject:”trip invoice” etc.

Proton has overcome harder issues than client side search. Please put a lot of time into this, it’s a solution that you can reuse for all of your products.

Must-have feature for modern e-mail systems

I have the "Search message content" enabled and message content indexed; however, the search feature is still unreliable -- it misses emails with content including the search words that have been cut and pasted directly from emails. Reliable search is a critical and essential feature of any decent email service.

Here are some additional recommendations for improvements to search:

In "More search options":
- Add a "Email Subject" filter field that uses freeform text
- Add a "Email Body" or "Email Content" filter field that uses freeform text
- Add a "Has attachment" filter field that uses boolean operators
- Add a "Attachment Type" filter field that uses either drop down with predetermined options or freeform text

Yes. I have v1.0.6 on Mac OS and even though there is a feature to "search for keywords in the body of email messages", this is not the case. The search will only search titles and email addresses.

Either the option/ "feature" should be removed or it should actually work. The latter would be great as it is a basic feature of email clients.