Comment by the__alchemist
Comment by the__alchemist 2 days ago
As far as I can glean, this is a "me" problem, but does anyone else find Thunderbird's search to be mostly-broken? I.e., will not find emails that should turn up in a query.
Comment by the__alchemist 2 days ago
As far as I can glean, this is a "me" problem, but does anyone else find Thunderbird's search to be mostly-broken? I.e., will not find emails that should turn up in a query.
I submitted a Thunderbird bug 13 years ago now, that Thunderbird doesn't let you just search for a word, and find all copies of that word: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844 . Their search instead tries to be clever, but it then finds stupid stuff like (in my case) "The base of Wedding is wed. The plural of wed is weds. Lets return every email ever from a Wednesday"
Still not fixed.
I have found that "Quick Filter Bar" is often much better at searching if you know which folder the email is in.
It helps to sort the results by date rather than relevance. Relevance is the default and the results are all over the place and it does indeed feel utterly broken :)
Even worse: the Swedish translation is lacking, so I use English. But my emails are often in Swedish. Making åäö and aao equal is never what I have ever wanted.
Not as bad as gnome which - in addition - has not let me reliably set things like date formats or first day of the week since several years despite using Swedish as my language.
> That's kind of the point of the Unix text stream philosophy? TB stores as text, and then you can use the best text search tool you have.
To some extent, yes. Though emails are structured text and a bare string search is far from an optimal search strategy.
> Do you use mbox or maildir, out of curiosity?
Whatever the Thunderbird default is.
Thanks and good point about the structured data.
I ask about mbox (one file system file per Thunderbird folder - e.g., one file named Inbox containing all its messages) or maildir (one folder per TB folder, containing one file per message) because it affects search using outside tools that don't understand that folder structure.
I'm wondering how efficient they are: When you search, does grep return an Inbox mbox file at a certain line number, or a maildir file?
It seems to be mbox, one file per Thunderbird folder.
Thunderbird itself seems to build some kind of an index next to mbox files. But finding the relevant email in TB's files makes it much easier to locate and open in TB itself (if it's needed). But I'd heavily prefer it to not be this way.
I agree, the search is quite bad.
The UI is bad and the results seem to be poor. I don't necessarily have the issue that emails are not in the results, but more that results are too numerous and the only way I can narrow down results is putting more constrains in the UI. What often happens for me is that I search using a several terms or some specific phrases and the search returns tons of results (does it just do an OR between words in the search) and I then end up clicking (why can't the time constraint be a slider?!) through different months (based on what I recall about the timeframe of the email) until I find the email.
When I was using notmuch I recall results being much better.
Another annoyance is that Thunderbird only seems to search locally, i.e. if I don't have some folders downloaded it will not do a server search as well as a local search (maybe there's a setting for it?)