Who needs better email search for Thunderbird?
Thunderbird’s email search isn’t that great by today’s standards. If I type “red dog” into the search bar it doesn’t even tokenize and search for the words separately — it’s a substring match so “my dog is red” isn’t found. And it’s slow.
What about embedding “real” fulltext search into it? Sphinx perhaps?
Just a thought.
Who the heck uses Thunderbird? Ew :)
Sean
29 Jan 09 at 1:06 pm
It’s worse than that. I also need better access to search (instead of that ridiculous Edit -> Find -> Search), and I need the option to search all accounts, not just one at a time.
Tim McCormack
29 Jan 09 at 10:26 pm
@Tim: just use the search box instead of the menu ’short’cut?
Searching in multiple accounts could be a nice feature though, just as a better search. :)
Maarten
30 Jan 09 at 4:32 am
Hey Baron, have you looked into Thunderbird 3? http://ascher.ca/blog/2008/12/09/thunderbird-3-beta-1-a-platform-for-innovation-shapes-up/
I haven’t yet, but it looks interesting.
Steve Stedman
30 Jan 09 at 11:22 am
Ah… that looks nice. I’m still using the TB that is in Ubuntu’s standard repository.
Xaprb
30 Jan 09 at 3:19 pm
What? I love Thunderbird’s search. Are you using the search box in the right had corner? That’s not very good.
If you use the Ctrl + shift+F search its actually quite flexible. But nobody at work agrees with me on this, so its probably just me.
William
30 Jan 09 at 7:07 pm
@Maarten: The search box is only good for the current folder.
Tim McCormack
31 Jan 09 at 7:02 pm
Beagle is quite good for searching thunderbird emails (not default in ubuntu, but there are packages for it). The only problem is that it’s not well integrated with thunderbird. You search using beagle-search and when you click on an email it opens it in a separate thunderbird window. What I would like is thunderbird to use beagle internally when I type something in the search bar (or the search window) and show results in the usual interface (so that you can easily delete, flag, move, etc).
Kostas
2 Feb 09 at 7:57 am
There’s seek:
http://code.google.com/p/simile-seek/
It was a little unstable when I last tried it, but perhaps it’s more solid now.
Dave Edwards
4 Feb 09 at 3:32 pm
That new site of theirs leaves a lot to be desired. The old one is: http://simile.mit.edu/seek/
Dave Edwards
4 Feb 09 at 3:43 pm
Thunderbird’s search bar would be more useful for me, if there were 2 instances (or multiple?). I use TB for work, and I categorize my e-mails by projects (those are folders)
So when I look for a mail, I usually know what folder to search. But in 90% of my searches I’m looking for a mail from a
- certain person, and/or a
- subject
So I’d need two search bar, and a little checkbox for the AND/OR switch, that would make me really happy :-)
karatedog
1 Sep 09 at 6:04 am
Karatedog: If you want more flexibility there is a better search for you, press ctrl+shift+F, there you can search on many different fields and flip between AND / OR. However it still doesn’t find things in my inbox. Mail that has been Base64 encoded for example.
Moru
23 Nov 09 at 2:48 am
Moru: Thanks, I knew that, but that’s the heavy-weight version of search. What I suggested is a heavier than lightweight search based on my experience. Usually there are 2 cases of search:
1. you know the mail folder (aka project name or person), or the subject or the sender.
- you can narrow down by any of these, and in most cases the remaining information pops into your mind or you don’t have to deal with a few thousand
2. you are guessing about the information of the mail you are looking for. In this case the heavy-weight search is good (with its flaws)
karatedog
23 Nov 09 at 7:45 am
I’m more having the trouble that I’m sitting in front of my mailclient, looking at the mail in the background and the searchfunction STILL can’t find it whatever I search on.
Moru
23 Nov 09 at 7:50 am
Hi, Thunderbird search bar has never worked all the time I have been using it. I have found no pattern to why is doesn’t.
Tony
Tony
23 Nov 09 at 3:37 pm
Tony: try single word searches, those always work.
This may push the topic a little, but if TB stored its mails in mail-dir format (one mail=one file), we could let 3rd party crawlers – or even the OS – to do the search.
karatedog
23 Nov 09 at 6:27 pm
I had troubles with it just searching at all. I found out that the Global Search and Indexer wasn’t enabled. To check this, go to Preferences -> Click the Advanced Icon at the top -> Under the General tab, make sure the Global Search is enabled under Advanced Configuration.
Once you restart the client and attempt a search, it will download and index all your mail (may take quite some time). After all the indexing is done try another search and you should now get results.
Chyess
5 Jan 10 at 7:41 pm
@Chyess: Don’t forget to mention that you are using now TB 3.0
karatedog
6 Jan 10 at 7:00 am
Wow, tried the new version and it can even search in base64 encoded text now, exactly what I wanted. But I don’t like the tabben browsing, can’t close mail-windows with the escape-button :-)
Moru
7 Jan 10 at 3:51 am