Thunderbird Community Forum

When I search Messages (Ctrl+Shift+F) there used to be an option to select "Body" Contains [a text string]. But it's disappeared. The body of my emails IS downloaded and 'Keep messages in all folders for this account on this computer' IS checked in the Sync. and Storage section of Tools/Account Settings. So how can I get the ability to search the body back?

In classic search, "To, from, cc, bcc" and "reply-to" are two separate searches. Is there a way to combine these in a single item in the drop-down list? The reason is I need to do

("To, from, cc, bcc" = <something> OR "reply-to" = <something> ) AND ("age in days" < 30)

so

("To, from, cc, bcc, reply-to" = <something> ) AND ("age in days" < 30)

does the job. I'd greatly prefer this to be classic search, but all suggestions welcome.

Many thanks

When I remove a Quick Filter, I'd like the list to move to the most recent message (my msg lists are sorted by date desc). Instead what happens is that after showing the full list, which includes redrawing the list so that it moves to the top, it forces the re-selection of the message that was selected when the Quick Filter was in place. What happens, a lot, is that after checking a message via filter from months ago, the filter is released, the full list appears briefly, I select the top message if I'm quick, and then it re-selects the message from months ago. I then have to scroll to the top or use ctrl home.

It's very stubborn about this behavior. Even if I

• select another email account which would not contain any hits for the filter
• wait for it to build that list
• select an email at the top of that list
• select the All Accounts top level Inbox folder

it will re-select the email that was selected when the filter was in place.

I filter a lot and each time I have to fiddle around with this to return to the top of the unfiltered list, which takes time.

It seems like a rather lame behavior, not sure if it acts like this by design or not. But it be better to at least have the option to have thunderbird go to the first message in the list. By the time the Quick Filter is released, doesn't it make sense to return to what would have to be the normal selection for most users, the top of the list?

The Thunderbird search feature use some kind of fuzzy search, but I would like to be able to search for the exact word I typed.

One example is if I look for "assurance", Thunderbird will show results for "assurer", "assurent" in addition to "assurance", but I would like only the email with the exact word "assurance" to be returned (sorry, my last search was using a French term, but you get the gist of my question even if you don't speak French). I tried putting the word between double quotes or adding a + sign in front of the word, it doesn't work.

Any option I didn't see that would let me do this or is it a feature request I'm asking here? I didn't find anything in the documentation, nor any add-on that would be helpful. Even when I’m sorting the results by relevance, with the number of emails I have, it's not as helpful than finding the exact word(s) I'm searching, which is what I want most of the time.

When I have the quick filter row displayed I can type something to search for. There is a row of "filters", like "unread", "tag", etc. that I can select to narrow down the set of messages to search in. But there's no indication which filter is active. The row of filters looks exactly the same whether they are active or not. As a result, it's hard to know if I'm not getting results because there aren't any or because I've clicked a filter by accident or have forgotten I did.

Even started in safe-mode Thunderbird 128.6.0esr (64-bit) Linux Quick-Filter doesn't filter newsgroup NNTP messages when the searches is performed on the "Body" of the messages. Works for searches in the "Subject" field, but not whether also "Body" is selected. The search in the "Body" works for regular Emails, the issue seems related only for newsgroup NNTP account messages. Please could you help me? Should I submit a bug report?

I've been doing this for (literally) decades.

If I initiate a search in all local folders, for example all messages to, from, cc or bcc a particular e-mail address, the results (as of about a week ago) now ONLY return messages found in Inbox or Trash. Also, after returning those results, the search indictor continues to 'spin' as if it's not done but still searching. None of the messages in my Sent folder appear in the results.

If I change my search to specifically look in the Sent folder, I get all the remaining messages I'm looking for. But it isn't helpful to have to perform two separate searches to get these two separate result sets.

I've tried quite a few things. Any ideas?

Hello, I’m using the latest version of Thunderbird. The Ctrl-Shift-F search does not offers me the option of searching in the message Body when searching the Deleted folder, although it is fine when searching in the Inbox. I have tried restarting Thunderbird to no effect. What is going on? Alan.

How can I filter the list of emails in a folder? There's this 'Ctrl-K' search box but does nothing like I want. I just want to filter the displayed list of emails by correspondent. The Ctrl-K system is a baffling mystery, AFAICT you always get a search for 'mentioning' of the search string, whereas a filter for correspondent would be useful too.

I'd like my search results to include messages where the search item is in the Sender or Subject but it appears to find only words in the body. Is there a way to include this? btw, the window pane on the left shows a filter but I don't know how it got there or how to delete it. Is this relevant? Is there documentation on how to use the search feature to specify folders, binary searches, etc? Thanks

Search is not finding emails that I can see are there. I looked at "Rebuilding the Global Database does not complete (Mac)" and although I use Windows, I followed the hint to look at the Activity Manager and the Error Console after an attempt to re-index failed to complete. The Activity Manager showed "Indexing 429 of 5663 messages in Sent - horshamquakermeeting@phonecoop.coop (IMAP) (7% complete)" The Error Console showed "1764413544692 addons.xpi WARN Checking C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\distribution\extensions for addons" I used Windows Explorer to look for addons.xpi on the whole of the C: drive. Not only is there not such a file but C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\distribution does not have an extensions folder. Also I have previously looked in C:\Users\Michael\AppData\Roaming rather than C:\Program Files (x86) to find Thunderbird files. Thunderbird is otherwise behaving well, just that I can't search for emails. I may have deleted too many files earlier when I was trying to remove an addon that I didn't want. How do I get back to normal?

I was using a Quick Filter search on an inbox and sent and then decided to check the Local folders and discovered that you have to turn down each subfolder and search it separately. Is there a way to have a quick filter search subfolders?

There still does not seem to be any way to search for an exact term. For example, if I search for "provider", I get matches for things like "provide", "provides", etc. This makes Search anywhere from unhelpful to completely useless: imagine trying to find emails that mention your friend "Don".

I am sure the people behind Thunderbird think that this "feature" is helpful, and occasionally it is, but it is disastrous when the user knows precisely what they want but can't find it.

Please can we have an option for exact matches only?

BTW, from I can tell people have been asking for this for at least five years.

How do I filter and search for dates in an MBOX on Thunderbird? The search seems to only go through email accounts and not Local MBOX files.

FYI I am using the extension ImportExportTools NG to open the MBOX file. And this picture shows that I can Sort by Date, either newest or oldest first but that's not what I want. I want to filter to a specific range between 2 dates or search for all emails from a specific date. How I can do this?

Before this new computer (this week), I had a 'go' button in Thunderbird that allow me to move to a specific folder without scrolling through all of them (I have hundreds of folders in TB). When TB was put on this new computer, it doesn't have the 'go' button, and the techies can't find it, and I can't even find any information on it. HELP!!

how do I search by date. I found one reference that said to go to the menu app icon and select "find" but there is no "find". Why is this so damn difficult to find?