Thunderbird Community Forum

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?

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

Hi all,

I'm desperately hoping someone can help me fix this so I don't have to dump Thunderbird for a different email client.

I have an email account hosted by some hosting company on a domain I own.

I noticed that Thunderbird was not returning certain emails when I searched for them. I searched, and found articles telling me to rebuild GloDa, so I followed the instructions to do that and quit Thunderbird and deleted the file. When I re-opened Thunderbird it started the re-indexing process, which I was viewing in the Activity Manager tool.

... except it only indexed a couple of the folders in my email account. It didn't index my archives, trash, spam, etc. It basically only archived the inbox and sent folders. I can see that from the list of completed tasks in the Activity Manager.

I've read on Mozilla's pages that Thunderbird indexes all folders, but it did not in my case, and as a result search is only returning a tiny proportion of my emails.

I need to be able to accurately track communications with my customers, so obviously if I can't get this fixed I'll have to move to a different email client.

I would greatly appreciate any help anyone can provide.

In a newsgroup I have a message containing the word 'werewolf' in its body. If I do a control-K search for 'werewolf' I see 'No messages match your search'. In the left of the display I also see 'Filters From Me (0) To Me (0). I don't know what this means and I don't know why the search couldn't find a message containing 'werewolf'. If I do a control-shift-K search and select the 'Body' button I see 'No message found'. The control-shift-F search will not look in message bodies. Why can't I find the message that contains the word 'werewolf'? What am I missing? Alan.

Hi,

Can you please have a look at the following problem: I decided to re-index my mails. after I realized that the search results did structurally not contain any messages from 2026. I deleted the global-messages-db.sqlite. However, this did not lead to the desired result. After processing some folders, I can see in Activity Manager that the indexing stands still after having processed about 20% of the "Sent Mail" folder of a gmail account. I waited more than 12 hours, but the number of indexed messages did not increase. The file size of the global-messages-db.sqlite at this moment is only 2.3 KB, while the original database was more that 300 MB large.

I already tried the following without success:

1. restarted TB
2. deleted the database for the second time
3. restarted my PC
4. repaired said "Sent Mail" folder

I am running Thunderbird 140.9.0esr on Windows 11.

Many thanks in advance for your replies.

Thomas

I've just upgraded to Thunderbird 141. I immediately wanted to search for all emails from one correspondent, which used to come under the Edit tab. I cannot for the life of me work out how to do it in the new version. This is probably the task I use most often apart from the basics. If you're going to make things less user-friendly, please tell me how to go back to my previous version. Diana

Dear community, I am using Thunderbird with a rather big IMAP Email account on two different Windows-11-computers. All emails are available on the machines. When searching for certain terms, usually not all emails are found. I have for example ordered a new Ryzen CPU earlier this year and got an order confirmation with "Ryzen" in the email text. When searching for "Ryzen" this email is never found but one much older email containing "Ryzen" is. When doing the same exercise with Outlook with the same email account on the same machine, four correct hits are returned. The issue can be reproduced on both Windows-11-machines and my Android phone with Thunderbird for Android. I have already deleted global-messages-db.sqlite, but this did not solve the issue. What else could be the reason for this issue! Thanks a lot in advance! Claudius

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.

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.

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?

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?

After converting from Outlook to Thunderbird, I can see there are 23 unread mails in my Inbox. My problem should have a very simple solution, but I cannot find any. How do I filter my messages in the Inbox to show only those unread???

Bjorn B. Juvkam

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!!

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?

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.