What are you trying to achieve in the first place?

Thanks for your reply.

I have several email accounts on my Thunderbird and sometimes I want to search for emails from a certain email account across all the accounts I have. I used to be able to just put that email address in the search box and it would bring up all emails from that account and it did this for every single email address that had ever emailed us. Lately though it returns null results for many email addresses even though I can see emails from that account in an Inbox.

So my query is trying to find out if a deliberate change was made to this field that means I'm no longer using it correctly or if this is a bug.

If you have any information on it, that would be great.

I presume you are using the 'Global Search' (Ctrl+K) If I start the type an email address, I get the prompt 'Messages Mentioning:...' and it will list various email addresses that are potential matches. If I select one of the email addresses then the results get displayed in a new tab.

It is possible you may need to rebuild the global database.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database

• Menu icon > Help > More Troubleshooting Information
• Under 'Application Basics' - Profile Folders - click on 'Open Folder'

A new window opens showing contents of profile name folder

• Exit Thunderbird now - this is important
• Scroll down and delete this file: global-messages-db.sqlite

Start thunderbird

You can check each folder to see if it has this selected:

• Right click on folder and select 'Properties'
• Select checkbox 'Include messages in this folder in Global Search Results'
• click on 'OK'

Thank you @Toad-Hall That worked!

Until recently, if I typed a name or email address in the search function of thunderbird, what would happen is that the messages would all be showing in my inbox. But now that does not happen, instead, it forces some kind of complicated search where I need to find the correct email in the search thread to try to access it, which is very cumbersome and with a far lower success rate. Does anyone know why this is happening and what can I do to get back to how it was before?

Until recently, if I typed a name or email address in the search function of thunderbird, what would happen is that the messages would all be showing in my inbox. But now that does not happen, instead, it forces some kind of complicated search where I need to find the correct email in the search thread to try to access it, which is very cumbersome and with a far lower success rate. Does anyone know why this is happening and what can I do to get back to how it was before?

Sounds like you selected the Inbox folder and used the 'Quick Filter Bar' search to filter Inbox messages based on search parameter. If I type name or email address in the 'Quick Filter Bar' search and select 'Sender' as the filter option, then it displays all received emails where sender = name or email address. However, the name must be either display name which sender included or a matched email address of sender. It will not find the name if it is a Display name you have applied to the Contact and that display name was not included in the email by the sender. The 'Display name' must be part of the email address in the headers.

The "some kind of complicated search" you mention is the Global Search function which is prompted when no matching results are located in the selected folder when using the Quick Filter Bar' search function.

Please note, this particular question was all about the 'Global Search' function, so the 'Chosen Solution' would help fix a problem in that particular search function.