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Please disable fuzzy/similarity search! Exact word search is impossible, both in global/quick filter and "search messages".

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by Zenos

paulnewm
paulnewm
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We need exact word search (not fuzzy/similarity)! If I try to find customed, I get hundreds of messages with "customer" highlighted. This was supposed to be a "feature" but actually is more like a bug (or a bad implemented feature anyway). Please let us decide if we want exact word search or want to accept variations/word families/respelled words! Please don't think you know better than us what we're searching for! Also boolean search in "Search Messages" window doesn't work properly. If I try to find messages that include "customed" in the body and don't include "customer" I get exactly the same results as in quick search. The condition to exclude "customer" is ignored and the respelled word (customed -> customer) that TB thinks I'm searching for takes precedence. This feature is purely broken! Also, having "exact word search" instead of similarity I bet would be faster and less resource intensive. We don't need TB to modify our search terms!

We need exact word search (not fuzzy/similarity)! If I try to find customed, I get hundreds of messages with "customer" highlighted. This was supposed to be a "feature" but actually is more like a bug (or a bad implemented feature anyway). Please let us decide if we want exact word search or want to accept variations/word families/respelled words! Please don't think you know better than us what we're searching for! Also boolean search in "Search Messages" window doesn't work properly. If I try to find messages that include "customed" in the body and don't include "customer" I get exactly the same results as in quick search. The condition to exclude "customer" is ignored and the respelled word (customed -> customer) that TB thinks I'm searching for takes precedence. This feature is purely broken! Also, having "exact word search" instead of similarity I bet would be faster and less resource intensive. We don't need TB to modify our search terms!

All Replies (3)

paulnewm
paulnewm Question owner
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Note: "customed" is the word I'm searching for. It is not a misspelled word (in fact, it's the name of a company but that shouldn't matter anyway).

paulnewm
paulnewm Question owner
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Also, I know I could use "Search Messages" for message from or to "customed" but what if I don't know the exact email address, or what if I want to search for mails just mentioning "customed" in the body but with various recipients/senders?

Zenos
Zenos
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How are you with Regular Expressions? This add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmailui/

gives you out-of-the-box greater search precision, and with regular expressions for to:, from:, subject: and body: lets you be precise or fuzzy. One of the first things you'd have to learn is to how to tell it to ignore case; a regular expression search for 'customed' wouldn't automatically match 'Customed'.