Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi, Address Book Search doesn't show any results for example Phone Numbers or Addresses.

Search for Phone Number 030 shows: No contacts found - which is not true! Search for Address City Berlin shows: No contacts found - which is not true!

Please improve the search, so that it considers any contact detail.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards blueice_haller

if i use the search function thunderbird find nothing although hundrets of the searched mails available are.

example i got 100 Mails from insurance Allianz Direct if i put allianz in the dialog Thunderbird find nothing i tried it via strg shift F it is the same

what shell i do?

best regards

When I search for a name in Thunderbird mail e.g Lennart, nothing from 2026 comes up, only older mails from 2025-12-31 and backwards. if I search on his e-mailadress, e.g l.name@ppost.se it finds avery mail. What is wrong?

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?

Hi,

I do like Thunderbird but there are a couple of things that i'm finding it frustrating to work with and wondered if someone could provide some help?

So I use quite a lot of nested folders, sometimes up to 5 levels deep to keep things organised. Eg:

I a sub folder structure like so:

Trips - -Asia 2025 - - - -Hotels - - - -Flights - - - - - -International - - - - - -Domestic - - - -Parks - - - - - -Park 1 - - - - - -Park 2 - - - - - -Park 3 - -Europe 2025 - - - -Parks - - - - - -Park 1 - - - - - -Park 2

I'd like to be able to be able to select a top level folder (such as Asia 2025) and see all the messages in it and all it's subfolders. Effectively ALL the emails relating to the trip. Is there a way to achieve this?

Second issue: I have a saved search folder called Flagged. Right now I have to edit the properties of the saved search, then click "Choose" and manually tick each folder / sub folder I wish to show flagged messages for. I know I can select the first, select the last, press spacebar to toggle those folders. But it doesn't expand subfolders, and it means that when I add more folders (which I do very very often), I have to remember to manually update the list of selected folders (on 2 machines too as i have this account set up in 2 places). Is there a way to just select a parent folder (in my case i'd like to just select the account itself) and have it automatically include everything below that. Then I don;t need to update or change it as my folders change.

Surely both of these suggestions are sensible and would increase the usability of Thunderbird.

Also, how can I find out what folder a message is stored in from the message in cards view, the message detail panel itself or the right click menu of the message card?

Thanks, Neil

I feel so incompetent regarding this because I feel it should JUST WORK, but for me it just doesnt...

When searching for a name/date/etc in the top right search bar I typically get no result or unusable ones. Obviously this is a problem when I dont know where a particular email may be.

When I use the search messages window from my root folder, the one that gives more flexibility ie; match any, subject,contains, etc...i also get no results. For example a message that is currently an open tab in TB cant be found by that search messages window. its still searching and i began the search before I started writing this question...

When in a folder or sub-folder, the quick filter search feature works as expected.

I've checked all the places i could imagine that might govern global search options that might change this critical seeming lack of functionality and have found none.

Is this a true limitation or am I just missing something ?

thanks for your consideration- q

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?

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.

Hi All,

Just wondering what the roadmap is for multisearch functionality?

I might be a bit dim, but how do you actually search the support forums, as I suspect that this question has been asked before. There are no results returned for multisearch or RFC 7377 or ESEARCH.

Also is it possible to return search results as a vertical list instead of tiled responses, there's a reason why google doesn't do this.

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).