Hi,
I am using Thunderbird 11.0.1 and am trying to use the search feature to find text in the body of email messages. I have done several tests by copying text from an email into the search bar and searching for it (choosing the pulldown option that says "Messages Mentioning XXX"). I consistently get zero results. I do get results when I search for terms in the subject line of sender / recipient, but not when searching for a specific word that I know exists in the body of at least one email. As an example, I often need to lookup an invoice or receipt for doing the budget or warranty support, so I will search for the exact amount of the transaction that shows up in my credit card statement, like $4.47. I get zero results, even when I can manually find the email and confirm that it does indeed contain that exact text.
This seems like very basic search functionality to expect from any search feature, and Thunderbird is completely failing. Any ideas? Does anyone else get the expected results for specific searches within the body of a message?
Edit: I played around a bit more now and I find that as long as I don't use any numerical characters I seem to get reasonable results. Is there something that intentionally excludes numbers from the search feature?
Thunderbird 11.0.1 search feature broken
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DanRaisch
- Moderator
- Posts: 127222
- Joined: September 23rd, 2004, 8:57 pm
- Location: Somewhere on the right coast
Re: Thunderbird 11.0.1 search feature broken
POP or IMAP type account?
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Reederoo
- Posts: 3
- Joined: April 6th, 2012, 7:18 pm
Re: Thunderbird 11.0.1 search feature broken
Hi,
Sorry for neglecting this post. I must have missed your reply and been busy with other things. As it turns out, I came across my own post again just now after experiencing similar search problems again in the current version of Thunderbird (38.5.1 on Windows 8.1).
I am using IMAP accounts and have multiple accounts set up in Thunderbird (2 gmail, 3 purehealingfoods.com - our own domain on the server that hosts our health food website)
I have still not resolved the issue in the original post, and now have another use case that may be related.
The current use case is that I was searching for the history of emails from PayPal that it sends whenever you withdraw money to your bank account. The subject is always "We're transferring money to your bank". If I use the global message search box and search that including the quotes, I get the exact results I am looking for (9 emails). However, I originally did not have the exact text of the subject handy and was searching terms like paypal transfer, or transferring to bank, etc. Those searches did not return any of the emails. In fact, I can search the exact text of the entire subject, but without the quotes, and I get zero results.
If I know that thunderbird can find 9 emails with the exact text in quotes, why can it not find those same emails when the search is without quotes? shouldn't that be a less restrictive query than with quotes? It doesn't seem to be an issue of the emails not being indexed, because they can be found with the right search term, but it makes the search feature almost useless if you have to know the exact phrase beforehand in order to get any results.
I am still having trouble with the numerical searches also. For example, I knew that one of the withdrawals had the amount of $62.81, so I searched that to find one of them, but got zero results. As it turns out, the email that was returned using the exact subject search with quotes contains this sentence: "You asked us to transfer $62.81 USD from PayPal to your bank account, and we're processing it now.", so the numerical search term should have returned that email if Thunderbird search was working as expected.
Any ideas? Is this a Bug? Any other reports of similar problems?
Sorry for neglecting this post. I must have missed your reply and been busy with other things. As it turns out, I came across my own post again just now after experiencing similar search problems again in the current version of Thunderbird (38.5.1 on Windows 8.1).
I am using IMAP accounts and have multiple accounts set up in Thunderbird (2 gmail, 3 purehealingfoods.com - our own domain on the server that hosts our health food website)
I have still not resolved the issue in the original post, and now have another use case that may be related.
The current use case is that I was searching for the history of emails from PayPal that it sends whenever you withdraw money to your bank account. The subject is always "We're transferring money to your bank". If I use the global message search box and search that including the quotes, I get the exact results I am looking for (9 emails). However, I originally did not have the exact text of the subject handy and was searching terms like paypal transfer, or transferring to bank, etc. Those searches did not return any of the emails. In fact, I can search the exact text of the entire subject, but without the quotes, and I get zero results.
If I know that thunderbird can find 9 emails with the exact text in quotes, why can it not find those same emails when the search is without quotes? shouldn't that be a less restrictive query than with quotes? It doesn't seem to be an issue of the emails not being indexed, because they can be found with the right search term, but it makes the search feature almost useless if you have to know the exact phrase beforehand in order to get any results.
I am still having trouble with the numerical searches also. For example, I knew that one of the withdrawals had the amount of $62.81, so I searched that to find one of them, but got zero results. As it turns out, the email that was returned using the exact subject search with quotes contains this sentence: "You asked us to transfer $62.81 USD from PayPal to your bank account, and we're processing it now.", so the numerical search term should have returned that email if Thunderbird search was working as expected.
Any ideas? Is this a Bug? Any other reports of similar problems?
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tanstaafl
- Moderator
- Posts: 49647
- Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm
Re: Thunderbird 11.0.1 search feature broken
Moved from Thunderbird Bugs to Thunderbird Support. The Bugs forum is meant to discuss triaged bugs (bug reports submitted to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ that have been confirmed), while the Support forum is meant to get help.
There are several ways to search - global search, quick filter bar, edit -> find etc. Does this problem only occur with global search? If so the search index might have gotten corrupted. Try exiting Thunderbird, deleting the global-messages-db*.* files in the profile, restarting and let it rebuild the search index. Then try again. Its also possible the search index is fine, but your folder was corrupted. That is usually an issue just for the inbox, as its the main folder that both lots of messages and lots of deleted messages. POP accounts are much more vulnerable than IMAP accounts to this, but it can happen with a IMAP account.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_fol ... hunderbird
There are several ways to search - global search, quick filter bar, edit -> find etc. Does this problem only occur with global search? If so the search index might have gotten corrupted. Try exiting Thunderbird, deleting the global-messages-db*.* files in the profile, restarting and let it rebuild the search index. Then try again. Its also possible the search index is fine, but your folder was corrupted. That is usually an issue just for the inbox, as its the main folder that both lots of messages and lots of deleted messages. POP accounts are much more vulnerable than IMAP accounts to this, but it can happen with a IMAP account.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_fol ... hunderbird