Text search improvements missing

Discussion of features in Mozilla Thunderbird
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latimer
Posts: 5
Joined: March 12th, 2012, 1:41 am

Text search improvements missing

Post by latimer »

As mailboxes grow larger over time a good search mechanism becomes crucial.
I think Thunderbird search needs some improvements in this respect.
Especially the following comes to my mind:
1. The stemming algorithm should be an option as it tends to give too many unrelated results
2. Substring search should be the default like google and regexp engines do it. The current wildcard search doesn't work if the search term is at the end of a word.
3. Sorting the results by date should be the default. Most people remember the time frame of a message, thus it is easier to find a message in the results.
4. The search index should be rebuilt more sophisticated. E. g. the index from folders which did not change, like archive folders, should be cached somehow so that rebuilding the index becomes faster and could be done regularly.
5. It seems that search for 2-letter words is not possible, not even like "ox". English has only few two letter nouns, other languages have many more.
6. Having the search results shown in list format should be selectable default.
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DanRaisch
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Joined: September 23rd, 2004, 8:57 pm
Location: Somewhere on the right coast

Re: Text search improvements missing

Post by DanRaisch »

Moving from Firefox Features to Thunderbird Features.
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tanstaafl
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Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: Text search improvements missing

Post by tanstaafl »

Unfortunately none of the developers seem to read these forums, so this forum is mainly used to discuss possible workarounds/alternatives.


See if http://kb.mozillazine.org/Search_-_Thunderbird has any useful workarounds. A lot of your criticisms seem to be specific to global search. I hope the Expression Search / GMailUI add-on gets modified to support version 68, I found it a very useful enhancement to the quick filter bar , which I sometimes used against a saved search to get around its limitation of searching only the current folder.
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