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Scrolling to (or searching for) messages on a particular date

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by Matt

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I have years of messages in my Inbox. Often I'd like to see the messages sent and received on a particular date. The only way I've found is to use the scroll bar at the right side of the message list -- either clicking in it over and over, or using the arrow keys. (Note: Because I have tens of thousands of messages in my inbox, it's very hard to point to the thumb in the scrollbar and drag it up or down. Just a tiny movement of my wrist can jump weeks or months.)

I've thought of searching the message header for text like "15 jun 2020" (with the quotes to prevent searches that include "15", "jun", and "2020" separately). The help article Global Search says "The search is performed in all fields in all messages: subject, message body, From address, To address, etc." That doesn't seem to be true... I can look at the header of a message with Ctrl+U and see the date strings there, but the search doesn't find them. (Also, a search like that would be too broad if I search for, say, "4 aug 2020" and get results for "4 aug 2020", "14 aug 2020", and "24 aug 2020".) I'll attach a screenshot showing those fields.

It would be nice if Thunderbird had a "Go to date" command. (My inbox is sorted by date. A command like that might be harder to use if someone sorted their inbox on a different field.) Any other suggestions? Thanks... this would be such a time-saver!

I have years of messages in my Inbox. Often I'd like to see the messages sent and received on a particular date. The only way I've found is to use the scroll bar at the right side of the message list -- either clicking in it over and over, or using the arrow keys. (Note: Because I have tens of thousands of messages in my inbox, it's very hard to point to the thumb in the scrollbar and drag it up or down. Just a tiny movement of my wrist can jump weeks or months.) I've thought of searching the message header for text like "15 jun 2020" (with the quotes to prevent searches that include "15", "jun", and "2020" separately). The help article [[Global Search]] says "The search is performed in all fields in all messages: subject, message body, From address, To address, etc." That doesn't seem to be true... I can look at the header of a message with Ctrl+U and see the date strings there, but the search doesn't find them. (Also, a search like that would be too broad if I search for, say, "4 aug 2020" and get results for "4 aug 2020", "14 aug 2020", and "24 aug 2020".) I'll attach a screenshot showing those fields. It would be nice if Thunderbird had a "Go to date" command. (My inbox is sorted by date. A command like that might be harder to use if someone sorted their inbox on a different field.) Any other suggestions? Thanks... this would be such a time-saver!
Attached screenshots

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Perhaps you should set up archiving by date so you can navigate to folders of year, month etc sounds far less unwieldy to me.

I just looked at the article you mentions. it says
The search is performed in all fields in all messages: subject, message body, From address, To address, etc. The search is not case-sensitive - searching for "thunderbird" will return messages that contain both "thunderbird" and "Thunderbird".

I do not see dates mentioned, nor do I see any references to header fields. I am not saying it is not poorly worded, but it makes no claims on searching by date or on undisplayed header fields. Historically it was designed as a full text search and it has certainly never been optimized for searching dates