Comments on: Searching for a new find

By: Pat C

Pat C — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 04:22:46 +0000

I wish there was a way to search the entire message in advanced search. Any time I have a lot of searches to do, I import my Thunderbird mail into Eudora and do the searches there. Perhaps the Eudora search engine could be used.

By: Robert Smol

Robert Smol — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:32:12 +0000

Hello, please have a look at Evolution’s email Search Folders (search across your all mail folders with various criteria, right click the mail and there is shortcut to create this search folder).

I think this is really good idea.

Also take in mind TAGGING, it helps to quickly differentiate mail in Inbox and one can automatically have a search folder for that.

Mozilla rocks!

By: Bastiaan

Bastiaan — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:15:34 +0000

You might want to take a look at eudora’s search options.

The two things I miss the most in current TB ‘advanced’ search are relative simple options like:

– search ALL headers

not just from:, to: , cc:, etc, but *all* the headers in the messages, including Received:, X-… headers, etc etc

– search WHOLE message

Means all headers + whole body.. No way to do this right now.

I made the switch from eudora to TB a year ago and these operators not being present in advanced search still nag me. Have to resort to tools like grepmail on my mbox files, which is no fun when dealing with 40k+ message files..

Also options like “has attachment”, “attachment file name contains” , “Spam Score ” would be nice.. And being able to search for text *within* e-mail attachments (supportin most major text formats like plaintext, pdf, open office, word, etc etc) would really kick a**

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:16:40 +0000

I’ve created a Search Folder that lists all my messages (Edit > Find > Search Messages > Save as Search Folder > Match all messages).

I use the GMailUI extension mentioned above to search in this folder. I type all: foo bar into the quick search box (with “expression” selected) and every part of all my messages is searched for foo bar.

It’s slow and buggy, but at least I know that if what I’m searching for exists, it will be found – which I was never sure about with the default search options.

By: Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » Auto-Complete on Subjects

Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » Auto-Complete on Subjects — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:20:38 +0000

[...] make an initial start on our new search aspirations we need to begin testing and trying out some of our improved searching [...]

By: Nicu Buculei

Nicu Buculei — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:54:13 +0000

Wow! I don’t remember even using the Advanced Search, but at the first sight the dialog looks familiar: is similar with the filter creation dialog, which is good enough for me (I rely heavily on filters).

But I use the Quick Search feature a lot, usually searching for subject and sender, because full body search would take quite a lot for some of my large folders (even if they are all local).
If the only option for Quick Search would be to search all folder, then full message search will become unusable for me.

By: WalterK

WalterK — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:19:23 +0000

Just a couple of comments. One of the things the current mail UI does best is being predictable. For instance, if you know what folder you email is in, you can directly navigate there. Any pure search based interface is lacking this predictability. So, please do not break what’s working already.

My current main issue with searching email is that I want the search find my most recent emails first, or at least have a choice from which end of my mailbox the search would commence. It’s highly probable that what I’m searching for is in the last 10 matching emails. When searching for an email right now, I need to think twice if I want to wait several minutes while a relevant result appears, or I’d be better of just manually scrolling through sorted messages in my mailbox.

By: AndersH

AndersH — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:59:53 +0000

Low hanging fruit: Please make “Match *all* of the following” the default.

By: Jens Hatlak

Jens Hatlak — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:07:24 +0000

I think a big improvement for the Quick Search would be to make it global and find messages according to both location (name of the folder the message has been sorted into) and tags. Maybe add a checkbox or something that switches between global and local search.

By: KiRe

KiRe — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:59:31 +0000

I would like search menu via the context menu.
Find related messages for the current message:
- from the same author
- with the same subject (ignoring Re:, Fwd:, …)

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:50:57 +0000

Marcus: There is someone in the Google SoC working on OS search integration for Vista right now; I believe Spotlight is what they are basing it off of.

Yevgen: No worries, the new search will be testing in the alpha and beta builds before it reaches anything critical. If it doesn’t perform as expected we’ll keep what we have and maybe just improve speed.

mish: I think we’re going to follow that kind of grammar for searching specific fields. I think we might even provide auto-complete for the grammar types so it’s faster and easier to use.

By: mish

mish — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:16:13 +0000

I like the gmailUI addon approach to search.

http://www.longshot.com/~kmixter/gmailui.html

By: Yevgen Muntyan

Yevgen Muntyan — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:36:12 +0000

Whatever you do, please don’t break it, firefox already screwed up google search. Quick search as it is may not be the best, but it’s pretty useful and convenient.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:24:37 +0000

I have been strugling with cleaning my inboxes (work, school, personal) with Thunderbird. One thing that bothered me quite a bit was the inability to search all my folder simultaneously. As I am in a Mac, I then looked for a Spotlight plug-in, and found that the only one available is defective.

So here are my two cents: allow for searches across all folder, and enhance the support for OS specific searches (Beagle, Spotlight, what have you)