Thunderbird Community Forum

When I reconcile my checking account each month, it's handy to be able to search my e-mail for the amounts of transactions that I can't identify by name alone. Gmail allowed me to do this. Thunderbird, for some reason, doesn't. Anytime I search for a numerical value (e.g., "36" or "9.58"), Thunderbird returns no results. Why are numeric strings not searchable? Is anyone working on this deficiency?

how to retrieve, via search, received messages in Thunderbird? when using search it only supplies me with those message which I posted myself, but these I received.

When I search for emails and click on a message from the search results, I receive an error message saying “Email not found”, and the email body does not appear. However, if I open the same email directly from the Inbox without using the search function, the email content is displayed correctly. I would like to be able to view the email body from the search results as well. Are there any known causes or possible solutions for this issue?

Prerequisite: This concerns behavior after migrating Thunderbird email data from an old device to a Windows 11 PC. Currently, I am only using Thunderbird for viewing emails.

On doing a search for mail ... it returns a number of mails ..... but many of them when I click on the entry it comes up with 'no message found'

Is there some index I need to rebuild or similar ?

Went to search for someone in the Quick Search and it did not bring up their emails in the folder, which exist as I confirmed by sorting alphabetically and finding them. Why is this?

I don't like the NEW Thunderbird, especially the Search function which is very frustrating and difficult to work if it works at all. the old one was much better where we could indicate filter elements and retrieve the emails we wanted! Is there some magic or secret methods to make this NEW one work?

Hello Thunderbird team,

We are an organisation that recently migrated from another email client to Thunderbird. Overall the client has been fast and easy to use, but we have identified a key functionality gap that impacts our day-to-day operations.

Previously we relied heavily on the ability to search not only in email body text but also inside PDF attachment contents (e.g., specific keywords within attached PDF files). In Thunderbird this capability is currently missing, existing search and add-ons (e.g., Expression Search – NG, etc.) do not index or find text inside PDFs.

This feature is critical for business users that need to locate emails based on text inside attachments. We would like to request that full-text search of common attachment types (PDF, Word documents, etc.) be considered for inclusion in a future Thunderbird release, ideally with options for indexing and performance controls.

If this is already on the roadmap, we would appreciate any guidance on how to enable it or track progress. If not, we would be grateful if the team could evaluate this enhancement.

Thanks for your work on Thunderbird and wishing you a happy new year!

The Global Search feature is okay (when it works). Problem is that it doesn't work reliably. For example, I have a plain text email in my inbox from a few days ago with some content in the message body "view your paycheck". Just a random example. I would expect this message to show up in the global search results when I type in the phrase "view your paycheck". It does not.

If I use the classic search function "Search Messages" (which as far as I can tell is only accessible by right clicking on an account or folder), the results are as expected.

I've already tried repairing the folder or deleting the database file. Those are workarounds that treat the symptom, but don't cure the problem permanently. It may 'solve' the issue for a while, but the problem always returns. I can't trust the Global Search results.

On the other hand, the classic search is flawless. It's even more reliable now that I have IMAP server doing service side indexing with Apache Solr.

My question is, can we have the Global Search configured to instead send the query to the server just like the option currently present in classic search?

Or at the very least, make an option so that classic search is a first class citizen instead of the global search.

Would like to see these enhancements made to Thunderbird:

1. Add recipient email address to view. This could be added next to the sender email address, separated by something like a pipe character "|" and identified by "From: ", "F: ", "Sender: ", or "S: " in front of the sender address and "To: ", "T: ", "Recipient: ", or "R: " in front of the recipient address
2. Add search filter terms to search capability. Some example filter terms would be 1) "mailed-to:" or "recipient" to search for emails sent to a specific email address or domain (using wildcard), 2) "mailed-from" or "sender" to search for emails sent from a specific email address or domain (using wildcard).

I have about 250 message filters that I have setup since 2006. The message filters take my POP mail and sort it into the inbox folders, delete the mail I don't want and even remove the entries from my POP server to keep things tidy. The filters work perfectly and some filters have more than 100 entries into a single filter! I have several hundred hours in this filtering and , as I said, the filtering is perfect. Now for my problem. I can go into "Message Filters" and use the search to locate the message filter I am attempting to edit. However, once inside the message filter, I cannot search for any entry that I have added to that filter. Sometimes, the filter may have 50-60 entries in it and it would be handy to be able to sort for the entry I need. Please understand that the message filter entries are applied in order (from top to bottom) and so, sorting the entries alphabetically would ruin the filter. I would like to know how to search ALL of the message filters for any entry inside the filter. It would be VERY HANDY if I could simply go to "Message Filters" and perform a search that would list not only the FILTER the entry was in but all occurrences of the search term as both a FILTER and an ENTRY TO THE FILTER. That is the way the email search works. If you search for any word in the search, it tells you every occurrence of the email and any occurrence of that search term inside any email. Can we make the search of message filters work the same way? Or, if it works this way, can you tell me how to use the search to find an entry WITHIN a message filter? Thank You.

When I opened it today, the search function was no longer working. Specifically, it does not progress past “Searching.” I tried deleting “global-messages-db.sqlite” as suggested online, but it did not resolve the issue.

When I do a command-F and get a "Search Messages" window, I get a list of things to search on. The left-hand side list starts with "Subject" and continues on to "From", "Body" and "Date". Way down near the bottom of the list, the atom "From, To, Cc or Bcc" appears. That is the option that I want 99% of the time. I do not want just "From" since that lets me miss messages in a thread.

If I select "From, To, Cc or Bcc", why is TB not smart enough to re-order these options so that the option I always pick is at the top? Barring that, is there any way that I can re-order these options manually? If so, how? If not, why not?

much thanx - ray (ray@ganymede.org)

Lately, when I do searches for emails, I get a listing of the emails I'm looking for, but when I click on the email, sometimes I get the message "no message found", even though it shows up on the search and I can find it manually with the date. Any ideas of how to fix this easily?

Often times, when performing a search in Thunderbird, the pointer in the message index (ie: your INBOX) will be updated downward (if you have a lot of messages, like I do). You have to manually scroll back to the top after -- but would it make sense to just have a button that does this, that brings your pointer back to message 1 in the view index (however you have it sorted) and updates the view accordingly?

Basically, press the button and you're back to the beginning of the message index.

My Thunderbird was not finding messages that I could see were there.

I followed the advice here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database.

I deleted the (large) global-messages-db.sqlite (I have been using Thunderbird for a long time - and I am monthly contributor).

The rebuild gets to a certain point and then stops (as indicated by Tools Activity Manager). Always at the same point. I guess there is a bad message in there somewhere. But now I am worse off than before.

I tried rebuilding several times. I have also compacted the account folders of the account that stopped and then tried rebuilding.

I have many years of messages in there and I need a functioning search. What can I do?

Hi to all.

PROBLEM: when I perform a search (CTRL+K) it happens that some results report the wrong sender, reporting as a sender one of the other of my email accounts configured on TB. When I open such a search result, the email is shown correctly with the proper sender.

WHAT I TRIED: I tried to "fix" the email folders involved in the error (the one related to the proper sender as well as that of the incorrect one) but this did not solve the problem. Also, I've been experiencing this issue for at least three years taking into account that I've changed and updated a couple of Gnu/Linux distros (mainly Mint and Ubuntu) and I've also changed two PCs. I've both imported previous profile folders as well as configured the accounts from scratch and downloaded all the messages of the several accounts from scratch.

Thanks. Regards.