Thunderbird Community Forum

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

When I have the quick filter row displayed I can type something to search for. There is a row of "filters", like "unread", "tag", etc. that I can select to narrow down the set of messages to search in. But there's no indication which filter is active. The row of filters looks exactly the same whether they are active or not. As a result, it's hard to know if I'm not getting results because there aren't any or because I've clicked a filter by accident or have forgotten I did.

After converting from Outlook to Thunderbird, I can see there are 23 unread mails in my Inbox. My problem should have a very simple solution, but I cannot find any. How do I filter my messages in the Inbox to show only those unread???

Bjorn B. Juvkam

When I search Messages (Ctrl+Shift+F) there used to be an option to select "Body" Contains [a text string]. But it's disappeared. The body of my emails IS downloaded and 'Keep messages in all folders for this account on this computer' IS checked in the Sync. and Storage section of Tools/Account Settings. So how can I get the ability to search the body back?

The Thunderbird search feature use some kind of fuzzy search, but I would like to be able to search for the exact word I typed.

One example is if I look for "assurance", Thunderbird will show results for "assurer", "assurent" in addition to "assurance", but I would like only the email with the exact word "assurance" to be returned (sorry, my last search was using a French term, but you get the gist of my question even if you don't speak French). I tried putting the word between double quotes or adding a + sign in front of the word, it doesn't work.

Any option I didn't see that would let me do this or is it a feature request I'm asking here? I didn't find anything in the documentation, nor any add-on that would be helpful. Even when I’m sorting the results by relevance, with the number of emails I have, it's not as helpful than finding the exact word(s) I'm searching, which is what I want most of the time.

Here is an image explaining the issue I've been suffering from the last two days. Before everything was fine :-(

Any search gives me "strange" results. The worst is when there are at least 25 emails in the folders and no one is found, and the list is empty... ... or if it finds some while the others are lost in the void and you're not aware of that??

Already, I've Rebuilt the index twice... no satisfaction.

I need that feature to work perfectly, otherwise I'm lost !!!!!

( Local folder is populated by at least 25 root folders + a lot of subfolders with many sub-sub-folders )

PS: 2° pic "Agrip" should give a result > I was searching "agrip"'s mails not yet moved in that Sub-Sub-folder