if you are limited by search in gmail, you are doing it wrong. you are saying gmail is inferior to thunderbird for search? over google? c'mon. you also take issue with apps running in the browser, which is counter-culture. you are refusing to accept that there are specific advantages to the additional functionality we have gained in the browser, while claiming your machine is more secure than Google's data centers. sorry but you're not making a sound argument.
Read in what context I said that gmail search is inferior to thunderbird for search. But yes, how do you, without googling it up, search for a message in gmail from address x, sometime in the year of 2010, where the subject began with y and the content contained z.
Counter-culture? Few would argue that native apps doesn't have advantages over browser apps. The best you could say about a browser app is that it is "good enough". But obviously they suffer greatly from being in the browser just because all workstation operating systems are centered around native apps and not apps within the browser.
Which means that I can click on my mail-application in the taskbar/whatever but whereas in a browser I have to navigate through all my browser windows to find the one with mail in it, which doesn't even have to be in it's own window but hidden somewhere with lots of other tabs.
Again, I never said that my machine is more secure than googles data center servers. But any native application has security advantages over something run in the browser (and potentially drawbacks as well, but the inherent issue with being logged in on a web app doesn't exist in a native application).
