Thunderbird Community Forum

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?

There used to be an option of searching by various fields such as From, To, etc. I cannot find it. The only option I find, is "mentions", and this does not include From. Took me a while to find a message today.

Is there such option somewhere?

Quick Filter does not return correct results in Unified Inbox (Thunderbird 140.12.0 ESR)

I'm using Thunderbird **140.12.0 ESR (aarch64)** and believe I've found an issue with the Quick Filter when searching the **Unified Inbox**.

• • Steps to reproduce:**

1. Open the **Unified Inbox**. 2. Open the Quick Filter bar. 3. Enter a search term (e.g. "maddy").

• • Observed behaviour in the Unified Inbox:**

• With no "Filter messages by" options selected, entering a search term does not filter the message list.
• Selecting **Sender**, **Recipients** and **Subject** still does not return the expected email.
• Selecting **Body** changes the results after a delay, but the expected email is still **not** returned.

If I open the **actual Inbox** containing that same email and repeat the search:

• The expected email is found using **Sender**, **Recipients** and **Subject**.
• When **Body** is selected, the search takes longer and eventually returns additional matching messages, including the expected email.

This behaviour is reproducible with multiple search terms and suggests that the Quick Filter does not search the **Unified Inbox (virtual folder)** correctly, even though the same search works in the underlying physical folder.

Could you please confirm whether this is a known issue or a bug?

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?

Sometimes a search term will pull up many emails I need to sift though, like in the case where it's a common word, like permit. I was searching the term "permit" for building permit emails and got many unrelated emails that were more recent with permit in the email body. I am able to quickly skim and see these are unrelated but the limiting factor is only ten results per page. When I click load more, takes a few moments to load. I was unable to find any way to change this. How can it be done? Should be possible, it's doesn't affect Mozilla's processing because everything is done locally on my machine. I would much rather 100 results to load or to load indefinitely.

Additional question: on that search term, many unrelated emails came up as mentioned before. When I searched the same term in gmail in my internet browser, only relevant emails came up. Why is this? How do I improve the thunderbird search?

I am getting a lot of phishing emails. They all come from email addresses from "onmicrosoft.com". These I can find pretty easy. The other thing they have in common is this URL/'server name' in the Message Header "send.workwithshadow.com".

Is there a way to search and/or filter for text in the Message Header?

Thanks, Walter Cook

I'd like to be able to search for a single email address in TB's inbox. Often I just need to find one email from an email address. I don't need or want to do a "saved search" I just want to reread a specific email from a specific sender. I believe I'm using the classic layout. I've looked through settings, layout, but can't find a way to do that. When I looked through the help articles, etc, all that came up w/saved search. Before one of the latest updates, I could just type in the sender's name or email address, look through all of them, then restore the inbox to list all emails by date. I'd like to be able to restore that function, is there a way to do that?

I have some emails from BT (e.g. no-reply@inform.bt.com, BT@updates.bt.com, hello@message.bt.com)

When I search (using the bar at the top) for:

- "bt", it returns no results ("No messages match your search) - "message.bt.com", it returns the relevant results - "bt.com", it seems to return anything with ".com" in it (which is lots of things, my computer doesn't like this situation)

Is this a bug (or multiple bugs)?

I was wondering if there is a way to easily copy a saved search from one parent folder to another. I have searches I use to c apture emails for tax purposes. I use dates, subject lines, etc. to capture these emails and I have almost a dozen per tax year. It would be nice to copy my 2025 saved searches to my 2026 folder, and then just edit the dates as needed to capture the correct year. Thanks for any help you can provide.

How I could terminate the search when it has reached the end of the e-mail, and not just tell me "reached end of page, continued from top", a message that is so obscure and — if the window is quite narrow — will not even show.

Why I cannot select to get a pop-up note telling me I've reached the end of e-mail and ask if I would like to continue from top?

I have used thunderbird for many years and was always very pleased with how easy it is to search for old emails, using just about anything--an email address, a word in the subject line, or anywhere else. Lately, it no longer finds all the message for a simple thing, like an email address. Has something changed?

Also it seems that copies of my emails are not necessarily kept locally in that it often says it has to download my messages off the server, which can take a bit of time. In the past it has only downloaded new messages, but now it seems to download everything.

All this leave me with the sinking feeling that my whole online record could disappear at any minute. Any ideas?

Hello,

I want to make Saved Searches

So the 3rd step is to choose your folders.

I have a TON of folders and mostly I want to

Start from all folders and only unselect a few of them.

But here it starts from all subfolder collapsed and all folders unselected.

So for me the first step is to manually expand all folders, and subfolder and subsubsubfolders and so on.

And then go down the entire list and select every single one.

And THEN start from the top of the list again and now, choose which one in particular I want to exclude.

I know this sounds like, I should just check the ones I want to include.

But for some reason, that feels completely impossible to do. I can only unselect the ones I don't want and it feels impossible to only select the ones I want "which is all except a few"....

Usually, I never make it to the end and just give up before I get to the stage where I would start unchecking the ones I don't want.

So, this is the reason for this question.

"In Create Saved Search, Choose Folder dialog, how to select all and expand all folders ?"

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.

After a recent update to Thunderbird (months ago), I found that when I search through my emails by name, it will find those emails and list them for me. But when I go and click on one of those found emails, it arbitrarily brings up some unrelated email - it never brings up the one that I click on.

How can we fix this? Thanks. Dr. Howard Neufeld

I've been using T-bird since nearly the beginning, and I've always been able to search for a string in a message by hitting the slash ("/") and typing my search string. This appears to be a shortcut for Ctrl+F (on Windows, currently Windows 11).

With T-bird 151.0, when I press "/" it is ignored... the first time I use it. If I press Ctrl+F and do a search, then I can start all subsequent searches in that message with a slash. If I close that message and open another, I must again use Ctrl+F the first time I want to search.

My muscle memory constantly forces me to type "/<string>" to search, but since T-bird ignores the slash, the following characters immediately take action, usually causing me to navigate away from the message, mark them as read/unread or as junk, etc.

Since I can use "/" on subsequent searches, I'm thinking this is a bug, not a feature removal. Can this be checked/confirmed? ...thanks!

(If this is a duplicate, please feel free to delete. I posted last night, but the question appears to have vanished from the forum.)

I'm using Thunderbird 151.0.1. After 151.0.0 was installed, the ability to press "/" ("slash") to search while viewing a message was broken. The slash is ignored, and following keystrokes are then acted upon.

If a search is initiated by pressing Ctrl+F, subsequent searches can be started with a slash. It's only when the first search is done that the slash is ignored.

I've been using Thunderbird since the beginning, so starting a search with a slash is in my muscle memory. As a result, I've inadvertently marked or archived or starred messages, navigated to the next thread or next unread message, etc.

Looking at the release notes, I see that a search function was fixed in 151.0.0. I wonder if this is related to that fix?

In any event, can "press slash to start a search in the message window" be restored? ...thanks!

SEARCH MODE IS NOT WORKING IN MAIN OR SUB FOLDERS. AS A TEST, I SEARCHED FOR A WORD THAT I KNEW WERE IN THOSE FOLDER[S] AND IT COULD NOT FIND. IT SHOULD NOT BE THAT HARD TO DO; THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN DOGGING ME FOR YEARS AND I JUST MOVED ON WITH NO ANSWER. PLEASE HELP.

Why does the Thunderbird search for an email with certain information no longer work? It used to work OK. Now it usually fails to find any messages with the selected data. eg search for all messages that have jv16 in either the subject or body text. I know there are several in my Thunderbird but they are no longer found by the find function (although they do exist as found by a manual search).