Thunderbird Community Forum

I did Edit - Find - Search Messages and then Edit - Find- Global Search and searched for messages. Now all the e-mails in my Inbox disappeared. What can I do? Thank you.

Went to search for someone in the Quick Search and it did not bring up their emails in the folder, which exist as I confirmed by sorting alphabetically and finding them. Why is this?

since last update my *All Mail* folder is empty but at the top it says there are 138,944 messages. I can use some filters and SOME messages appear but by far not all that should match that filter. any clues? thanks,

Thunderbird 140.6.0esr (aarch64) on a Macintosh using Tahoe 26.1

My Thunderbird was not finding messages that I could see were there.

I followed the advice here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database.

I deleted the (large) global-messages-db.sqlite (I have been using Thunderbird for a long time - and I am monthly contributor).

The rebuild gets to a certain point and then stops (as indicated by Tools Activity Manager). Always at the same point. I guess there is a bad message in there somewhere. But now I am worse off than before.

I tried rebuilding several times. I have also compacted the account folders of the account that stopped and then tried rebuilding.

I have many years of messages in there and I need a functioning search. What can I do?

Just what the subject line says. Go looking for something and Search doesn't find it. Even after I remember the email and find it, Search does not find it.

Why is this? It is un-usable, actually as it happens all the time.

For instance, putting in a company name like "walmart.com" will find some but not all the emails with walmart.com and certainly not the most recent ones specifically with a person's name.

I'm trying to understand why the Quick Search (which I use all the time and is generally *amazing*) is not working for one specific email. The sender is "Marlene Hulda". I have attached the following screenshots:

1. A screenshot of my Inbox showing the email, along with a few others 2. A search using the word "Marlene". That search results in "no message found". 3. A search using the word "Hulda". That search results in "no message found". 4. A search using the word "welcome". In this case, it does find the email.

Any suggestions on why it cannot find the email in step 2 or step 3?

Thanks for your help.

Here is an image explaining the issue I've been suffering from the last two days. Before everything was fine :-(

Any search gives me "strange" results. The worst is when there are at least 25 emails in the folders and no one is found, and the list is empty... ... or if it finds some while the others are lost in the void and you're not aware of that??

Already, I've Rebuilt the index twice... no satisfaction.

I need that feature to work perfectly, otherwise I'm lost !!!!!

( Local folder is populated by at least 25 root folders + a lot of subfolders with many sub-sub-folders )

PS: 2° pic "Agrip" should give a result > I was searching "agrip"'s mails not yet moved in that Sub-Sub-folder

Whenever I try to search my various emails for some text, at least 40% of the time it shows me the attached message. I'm on Version 149.0.1 but it's been happening ever since I installed Thunderbird (maybe 4 or 5 months ago?) My first move is to check that I haven't mis-spelled the word I'm looking for (which I usually haven't) and I definitely know that the word is valid for one or more emails. So why does this message keep appearing?

Previously I'd been running an old 32-bit version of Thunderbird (which I don't have installed any more) but I don't remember ever seeing this with the older version.

Hi, I don't remember exactly from which release it started, but for a couple of months, quick filtering has not been working properly. For example, when typing the sender's name, the results show emails from other senders, and the sought name can be found in the 'Copy' field or in the message text. However, quick filtering works as before, fully correctly in Troubleshooting mode 😳 Attached screenshots with quick filtering results shown when opening TB in 'Normal' and in Troubleshooting mode.

I installed and set up Thunderbird on my Mac in order to create a backup for a Yahoo/AT&T email account which I may be getting rid of. I used the imap configuration and connected just fine, everything downloaded and I see that the number of messages in my inbox is in the thousands (yes, I'm a person who saves everything in my email, please don't judge). The synchronization and storage are set to synch all messages locally regardless of age and don't delete any messages. However, when I search for old messages in my inbox, it produces no results. When I scroll through the inbox, the oldest message I can see is about 7 months old. There is plenty of storage on the computer. Any advice on how to get access to the older messages and how to make them searchable? Is there a limit to how many messages Thunderbird can display in the inbox? The whole point was to create a searchable backup of everything for when I get rid of the email account. Thanks!

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.

The subject says it all: command-shift-F [Search Messages (advanced search in folder)] no longer works for me in 141.0 on Mac. Does anyone else have this problem, and if so, how to fix it?

Thanks

John Anderson

"Open message in conversation" is no longer listed when I right click on an e-mail.

So I started investigating. Rebuilding the Global Database was suggested as a solution. So I deleted the "global-messages-db.sqlite" file (66MB), and started TB again.

Now the database starts rebuilding. I follow the status in the Activity Manager. It's stuck at: "Indexing messages Determining which messages to index in Inbox/+ 2023/+ Pantoon/+ Algemeen - Yannig.eu"

So I backup this folder "Algemeen", delete it from TB, and restart TB. Now the Indexer is stuck at the next folder. I once again backup, delete and restart. Now the indexer is stuck at the next folder in the list, and so on.

Any advice on how to break this cycle and get TB do index succesfully?

I have a lot of emails stored in different local folders. My search now hang. They go so far than just hang. Is there a way to rebuild the complete indexing for my thunderbird install?

Hi,

I do like Thunderbird but there are a couple of things that i'm finding it frustrating to work with and wondered if someone could provide some help?

So I use quite a lot of nested folders, sometimes up to 5 levels deep to keep things organised. Eg:

I a sub folder structure like so:

Trips - -Asia 2025 - - - -Hotels - - - -Flights - - - - - -International - - - - - -Domestic - - - -Parks - - - - - -Park 1 - - - - - -Park 2 - - - - - -Park 3 - -Europe 2025 - - - -Parks - - - - - -Park 1 - - - - - -Park 2

I'd like to be able to be able to select a top level folder (such as Asia 2025) and see all the messages in it and all it's subfolders. Effectively ALL the emails relating to the trip. Is there a way to achieve this?

Second issue: I have a saved search folder called Flagged. Right now I have to edit the properties of the saved search, then click "Choose" and manually tick each folder / sub folder I wish to show flagged messages for. I know I can select the first, select the last, press spacebar to toggle those folders. But it doesn't expand subfolders, and it means that when I add more folders (which I do very very often), I have to remember to manually update the list of selected folders (on 2 machines too as i have this account set up in 2 places). Is there a way to just select a parent folder (in my case i'd like to just select the account itself) and have it automatically include everything below that. Then I don;t need to update or change it as my folders change.

Surely both of these suggestions are sensible and would increase the usability of Thunderbird.

Also, how can I find out what folder a message is stored in from the message in cards view, the message detail panel itself or the right click menu of the message card?

Thanks, Neil

I added two new email accounts to my Thunderbird installation (140.12.1esr (64-bit) under Windows 10), and am able to receive and send mail just fine. But the T-bird Search utility doesn't work for those accounts. I can do a Search for an email address, subject, etc. that's showing on my screen for those accounts, but the Search utility comes up empty. Search does work for three other accounts, however. Any ideas?

Some customized search criteria work as expected, e.g. Content-Type, Message-ID, In-Reply-To, ...

Some not: Content-Transfer-Encoding, Content-Disposition

Some may appear more than once, e.g. Content-Type.

Searching for contents of such criteria / tags yields no results.

How to customize search for these criteria properly?

Below is a shortened source / example addressing all of these issues:

X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------3TP0..." Message-ID: <123456789...@example.mail> Date: Mon, 01 Jan 20... 12:00:00... MIME-Version: 1.0 User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird From: "from@example.mail" <from@example.mail> Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?MusterSubject?= To: "MusterTo" <to@example.mail> References: <...@....eurprd06.prod.outlook.com>

<...@....EURP193.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM>
<...@....EURP193.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM>

Autocrypt: addr=from@example.mail; keydata=

xsDNBGN2t...==

In-Reply-To: <...@....EURP193.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Dear Sir or Madam ...

Content-Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; name="=?UTF-8?Q?example=2Edocx?=" Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*0*=UTF-8' '%4...; filename*1*=%7...; filename*2*=%7... Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

UEsDBBQA...

Related threads/questions/keywords: filter, search, criteria, custom, message, body, header, tags, global

Best I could find: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1475007 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-saved-searches https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-thunderbird-main-window-supernova

In the Global Search view (without title "Global search" but the one you get when you press ENTER on the quick filter) I find 178 messages, but when I click on "display in list", then I get 0 results.

Often times, when performing a search in Thunderbird, the pointer in the message index (ie: your INBOX) will be updated downward (if you have a lot of messages, like I do). You have to manually scroll back to the top after -- but would it make sense to just have a button that does this, that brings your pointer back to message 1 in the view index (however you have it sorted) and updates the view accordingly?

Basically, press the button and you're back to the beginning of the message index.