Finding mail and/or contacts

My persistent issue over the years of using eMc has been the difficulty in searching and locating old emails (both contents and addresses). eMc, as many will know, permits syncing messages from the past year locally, or every message from all time, with nothing in between. I would be happy to sync 2-3 years of mail to my laptop, but for several reasons I don’t want to walk around with all 6+ years of messages.

It seems to me there are two workarounds:

  1. locate an email provider that works with eMc’s “server search” function. My provider does not. Does anyone know of a host where they can use eMc to search their on-server mail?

  2. Save all outgoing emails to contacts. That would at least capture an address if not the communications. I could not find an option for this, does one exist?