Thunderbird Community Forum

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?

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.

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?

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 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?

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

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'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