More advanced mail search
The current Proton mail search is barely usable, even on web with the advanced search options. iOS app is worse.
A few features in my mind:
Multi-word search string — e.g.
"my order"so every hit must match both words in that order, to avoid getting a lot of false hits that mention both "my" and "order" in different parts of the subject.Search by subject only — currently I can only search by sender only, or recipient only, but not, but I get lots of false hits if the term I am searching is a common email address. Try search for an email with "gmail" in the subject, and you will just get every mail sent by gmail. Or searching for "best" will yield all emails from "bestbuy.com".
Search by multiple folders – currently I can only search by one folder at a time. Imagine I have a few folders of similar and sometimes overlapping purposes (e.g. bank, tax, insurance) I might have misclassified an ambiguous mail under the wrong folder so I might want to search for all folders when I am desperate.
Search a mailbox tree – currently I can only search mails in a folder, not a folder and all its descendants. Imagine if I have a Bank folder and one subfolder for each bank, I cannot easily search among all bank emails.
Search for mails not belonging to a mailbox (or multiple, or tree) – this is really useful to locate mails (e.g. all from the given sender) not already classified into the folder. Without this and without "select all mails found by the search, not just the first 200 showing on screen" makes it impossible locate mails currently misclassified into a wrong folder.
Alan
shared this idea
-
krik
commented
I had a directory with about 1100 mails. About 50 of them were unread. There's no sensible way to only display these unread mails. Disappointing.
-
Jade
commented
Especially "Search by subject only" - this is critical and I don't understand why it's not possible.
-
August
commented
(This is not a solution or an excuse, just an observation about Proton’s architecture!)
As I understand it, all email is encrypted at-rest on Proton’s servers. They do not index or store plain text content for your messages, so it's effectively impossible for search to be handled in the back-end. This means that the syntax would have to be maintained independently for each platform and app.
Here's their explainer: https://proton.me/support/search-message-content
That said, the local subject-only search could *definitely* be improved with some basic operators (boolean, quotes, groups, etc.)
-
Anonymous
commented
I've got lots of mail. Need boolean features to search it.
-
CeBr
commented
Dear Proton Team and Community,
Currently, Proton Mail’s search functionality allows only basic filters and lacks support for full Boolean logic. This limitation prevents users from performing powerful, multi-condition searches that are vital for efficient email management.
Key issues:
No reliable way to search for emails tagged with multiple labels simultaneously (e.g., find emails with label A and label B).
No support for OR operators or parentheses to build complex queries.
Diagnostic and retention management workflows become cumbersome, requiring manual or multi-step workarounds.
Suggested improvements:
Implement full Boolean logic in search queries, including AND, OR, NOT, and grouping with parentheses.
Enable multi-label intersection queries such as label:Work AND label:Urgent to filter precisely combined label sets.
Enhance search syntax to support nested and compound queries for increased flexibility and automation.
Adding these capabilities will significantly improve user experience, reduce manual effort, and empower advanced filtering and diagnostics natively in the Proton Mail web and mobile apps.
Thank you for considering this enhancement!