Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi there, I’ve spent many hours trying to find an answer. Perhaps it’s right under my nose, but I just can’t seem to find it. Please help!

I’ve created extra folders in Thunderbird to keep my messages organized. Question: How can I locate a specific folder?

Example: I create a folder named "a555". I CANNOT FIND THE FOLDER "a555".

(why did I choose "a555"? It’s a unique combination of letters and numbers, which ensures there are no unintended search results.)

Searching for a message does reveal the name of the folder it’s contained in, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I want to be able to search for the folder itself directly.

I have tried searching using: Global Search (top right) – Ctrl + K; Specific Search – Ctrl + Shift + F; This Thunderbird forum; A general search on the internet.

Any answer would be greatly appreciated. Arthur Cerew.

For months, control-shift-k almost never works. Every once in a while it does briefly. No sense of what is different when it briefly works. Updates to TB don't seem to make any difference.

Thanks for checking this!

I have been using Thunderbird for a while.. I could always filter messages easily to help with mailbox cleanup, now it seems to have stopped working or a setting has automatically changed.. When activating Quick Filter, I could type in the 'Filter Messages' box and it would start listing the mails in that inbox as I typed, now it doesn't happen anymore..

I have been unable to add Yahoo as the default search engine. No matter what address I type in, it consistently comes up with "Could not add OpenSearch Provider for".

How to search Desktop Thunderbird with multiple accounts for email message that were sent/arrived during a specific date range, a "Global" search which covers multiple accounts. All of the guidance I have found online result with me needing to pick a particular account.

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?

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'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!

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

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.

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'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

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?