A bug in finding letters on Mail.Ru

Hello!

I recently participated in the migration of corporate mail from a small company to Mail.Ru hosting. I would like to note right away that Mail for migration has a convenient function for automatically importing mailboxes from other mail services, as well as support for automatically creating mailboxes from CSV files, both features were tested and did not cause any problems. A pleasant surprise was the availability of ready-made instructions for setting up access to mail for end users.

In general, everything would be just fine, if not one but ...

Employees often exchanged letters with counterparties with Excel-spreadsheets and actively use search for emails using data from these tables.

One of the employees complained that she could not find the letter, although it was definitely in the box. The search was carried out by the phone number located in one of the cells of the Excel file attached to the letter. When checking it turned out that the letter with the desired number was really in the sent ones. We simulated the situation on other mailboxes of the corporate account, and then on other personal Mail.Ru accounts - the problem also occurred there.

Mail.Ru presented a search for attachments more than two years ago, so it was difficult to believe in the presence of such a bug. But still decided to check. And already in the process of writing the article, the thought came not to be limited to Mail.Ru alone, but to go further and make a small overview of the search capabilities of Mail.Ru, Yandex and Gmail mail services as the most popular in Russia.

The following table was taken as a basis:



And such a document:



I saved the table in XLS, XLSX, ODS, PDF formats, the text document in DOC, DOCX, ODT, PDF. As a result, we got 8 files, inside of which there were 4 samples:

1) only text;
2) only numbers;
3) text with numbers together;
4) text with numbers separated by a space.

I sent the files to myself inside the test boxes. It turned out like this (using the example of the Mail.Ru interface):



The Sent Items folder was previously cleaned so that there were no duplicates.

When searching by the first sample (text only), Yandex turned out to be the best of all, confirming its corporate motto “There is everything!”



Gmail worked a little worse, without noticing the OpenOffice table:



Mail.Ru did not find either ODT or ODS:



Both Mail.Ru and Yandex can search by word forms, even non-existent ones:




Gmail by default searches for a word strictly in the same form, but even with the morph: on option it couldn’t reject the invented words. Well, for the overseas service is excusable. :)
After experimenting with the declensions and conjugations of different words, it seemed to me that Mail understands morphology better than others.

A nice feature of the search in Mail.Ru that I did not find in others is the highlighting of the found text fragment:



But, unlike Yandex with Gmail, the total number of letters found is not displayed here.

Now let's see how the search by numbers works out.

Numbers in the composition of words (3rd sample) could not be found. The same logic is observed when searching for parts of words: only the whole word is searched, in parts it does not work.
When searching for the 2nd sample (only numbers), Yandex worked again without problems, gmail still did not see the ODS table, but Mail.Ru found a more serious problem. Here, the search for numbers in Excel tables does not work either in the old XLS format or in the new XLSX:



If, in addition to the desired number, the cell contains text or another number separated by a space, as in the 4th sample, then searching by this number works (except for the OpenOffice files mentioned earlier):



My colleagues and I, having spent millions of the customer for the implementation of a customized mail service and received a decent rollback from Mail.Ru, wanted to hush up the problem,After setting up a convenient free service from a company with a well-known name in the organization, we decided that it would be right to help Mail.Ru in improving the quality of services by reporting a bug found. True, there were fears, as if after eliminating this and other bugs Mail.Ru did not decide to follow in the footsteps of Google, which made its mail paid for corporate clients. Comrades from Mail, if you read this and my fears are justified, then better not fix anything! :)

Just in case, after waiting a few days (you never know, a short-term glitch) and making sure that the situation did not improve, I wrote to tech support through the feedback form on the site.

A few days later, a technical support officer asked for screenshots with a detailed description of the problem. Strange, it seems they immediately described everything in detail. Oh well, the rules are the rules. We painted everything again, but with pictures.
A few days later comes a letter of this content, already from another technical support employee:

Hello.
Thank you for your attention to our service!
Your proposal has been submitted to management.
Sincerely, XXX Y Mail.Ru
User Support Service

Well then, let's see what management says. Management, as it usually happens, tends to carefully weigh and ponder all decisions, so I patiently waited a month, after which I asked what was done on the ticket.

The answer came:

Hello.
At the moment, this functionality is missing.
Sincerely, XXX Y Mail.Ru
User Support Service

In my opinion, the lack of functionality includes a broken search in OpenOffice documents, but the problem with finding numbers is a clear bug.

It is clear that priority is given to tasks that increase the company's profit and the found bug does not belong to this category, but I hope that Mail.Ru will fix it someday. And maybe add a search for ODT and ODS files.

I have not yet been able to evaluate one of the important, in my opinion, Mail.Ru features - “unlimited volume” of mailboxes (as far as I know, while it is free). Who is in the know, please unsubscribe in the comments to what maximum size you can inflate the boxes in fact.

UPD: in January 2018, the XLSX search was repaired