No Search in Android's default Email app

Thursday, May 19, 2011

So this is the situation. I have a GMail account that I use for 90% of my email, then I also have an exchange account for work. Rather than use two separate email apps I set up both accounts in the default email app as exchange accounts. This worked well as I got push, a combined inbox, and it nicely color coded each message to show which account it was sent to. That's until last night when I tried to search my email only to discover that you can't search in the default app. Wow, what a shocker!

Of course the native GMail app has great search capabilities. Fortunately GMail's "Send as" functionality works on Android too. So the solution was to set up sending from my work exchange account in the GMail web interface and then have all of my exchange email forwarded to my GMail account. Now I happily have all of my email in the GMail app where I can search it and when replying to work emails it replies from the correct account.

So there is a solution but it came as a huge surprise that I couldn't do this in the default app.