Thunderbird Community Forum

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 am on TB 146.0.1.

I recently noticed that some items seemed to be missing from global search results so I ventured to rebuild the GLODA index.

The first few times, it seemed to get stuck on specific IMAP sent folders. I repaired the folders and eventually, the index completed to full success. It is about 2.5 GB.

It still doesn't seem like some searches are working correctly, but maybe there is an explanation. Most of my email other than IMAP sent emails is stored in my Local Archives.

Using the term "klinghardt" for example, global search shows only results from 2025, a total of 992 items, and does shows some from both IMAP and Local Archives. From Local Archives, it shows 255 items in the "From Visitors 2016" folder. It does not go back prior to 2025.

However, there are many earlier emails in that folder before 2025 with the same term.

Using the term "klinghardt education" does show messages back to 2017 and a total of 524 of them in the "From Visitors 2016" folder. Why would using just "klinghardt" show less than "klinghardt education"?

The "From Visitors 2016" folder has almost 140K messages from about 10 years.

If I go "From Visitors 2016" folder and do Search Messages with the same "klinghardt" term on subject alone, I get 982 returned messages that go back to 2015. I believe this is not using GLODA but am not certain.

If I go to Quick Filter on Sender, Recipients, Subject, I get 1251 items going back to 2015.

If I see messages over many years with Search Messages and Quick Filter, why do I only see messages from 2025 when I use the global search?

To make things a bit more complex, there is also a "From Visitors" folder in Local Archives that has hundreds more with terms from 2011-2015 that don't seem to show up in the global search results at all with either of the above. If I use "klinghardt academy" though, some results do come back from the "From Visitors" folder. Total of 32K messages in the From Visitors folder.

I have already tried many options from the documentation and suggested by ChatGPT but am hesitant to do anything that could not be reversible.

At this point, I am unclear on what here is a problem vs. an explainable behavior.

I would be grateful or any thoughts or next steps you might suggest.

Thank you and happy holidays, :) Scott

Steps to reproduce the problems:

Perform a Global Search (ctrl + K). Search for any string. Just make sure there is at least one search result. > Click "Show results as list". > Right-click on the search result in the Message List Pane. (Please see the footnote.) > The pop-up context menu has two problems:

(1) There are redundant dividers. (Please see the first attached image.)

(2) Hover the mouse over "Tag". The pop-up submenu of "Tag" is incomplete. The menu includes "New Tag" and "Manage Tags". However, "Remove All Tags", "Important", "Work", "Personal", "To Do" and "Later" are missing. (Please see the second attached image.)

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These problems (redundant dividers and incomplete submenu) also occur in Troubleshoot Mode.

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These problems only occur after using Global Search and clicking "Show results as list".

If I right-click a message in the Message List Pane of a regular folder (such as the "Inbox" folder or "Templates" folder), the pop-up context menu displays correctly: There are no redundant dividers, and the submenu of "Tag" is complete. (Please see the third attached image.)

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Operating system: Windows 10.

Versions of Thunderbird: 140.3.1esr (32-bit) and 140.6.0esr (32-bit). Previously I was using 140.3.1esr (32-bit), and currently I am using 140.6.0esr (32-bit). Both versions have the same problems.

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Footnote: When I right-click on the search result in the Message List Pane, the following error messages display in the Error Console (please see the fourth attached image):

Uncaught NS_ERROR_FAILURE: Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIMsgDBView.getThreadContainingIndex]        mailCommon.js:647
    isCommandEnabled chrome://messenger/content/mailCommon.js:647
    fillMailContextMenu chrome://messenger/content/mailContext.js:340
    onPopupShowing chrome://messenger/content/mailContext.js:146
    handleEvent chrome://messenger/content/mailContext.js:133
    _onContextMenu chrome://messenger/content/about3Pane.js:5235
    handleEvent chrome://messenger/content/about3Pane.js:4758
    init chrome://messenger/content/about3Pane.js:4712
    async* chrome://messenger/content/about3Pane.js:170
    async* chrome://messenger/content/about3Pane.js:139

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The fifth attached image shows mailCommon.js:647.

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.

Is there any hope for us to have syntax which allows for advanced search through all the folders of a different account? Something that allows powerusers to type something like: "from:XXX to:YYY subject:"foo" after:20d" and get results?

I'm currently parsing all my email with notmuch locally to get something like this. It would be great to be able to get this type of functionality in Thunderbird natively. There are some adons that I have found but they seem like hacks; search needs to be super reliable.

• Apologies if this is has been asked before!

since last update my *All Mail* folder is empty but at the top it says there are 138,944 messages. I can use some filters and SOME messages appear but by far not all that should match that filter. any clues? thanks,

Thunderbird 140.6.0esr (aarch64) on a Macintosh using Tahoe 26.1

Search is not finding emails that I can see are there. I looked at "Rebuilding the Global Database does not complete (Mac)" and although I use Windows, I followed the hint to look at the Activity Manager and the Error Console after an attempt to re-index failed to complete. The Activity Manager showed "Indexing 429 of 5663 messages in Sent - horshamquakermeeting@phonecoop.coop (IMAP) (7% complete)" The Error Console showed "1764413544692 addons.xpi WARN Checking C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\distribution\extensions for addons" I used Windows Explorer to look for addons.xpi on the whole of the C: drive. Not only is there not such a file but C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\distribution does not have an extensions folder. Also I have previously looked in C:\Users\Michael\AppData\Roaming rather than C:\Program Files (x86) to find Thunderbird files. Thunderbird is otherwise behaving well, just that I can't search for emails. I may have deleted too many files earlier when I was trying to remove an addon that I didn't want. How do I get back to normal?

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?

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?

Hey

Thunderbird has a well-functioning Search function that uses the cache (or rather, what the background search process/function "read" and saved in global-messages-db.sqlite).

With a newly configured account (IMAP), it works like this:

- establishes the directory tree - downloads message titles (including sender, date, etc.) - *.msf summary files - then a process that downloads the entire message for local storage - in the background, an indexing process (GLODA?) starts, which creates a search database (subject, from, to, keywords in the message body) using the global-messages-db.sqlite file.

For very large mailboxes (>100k msg, ~50GB), this means that the server's content is transferred to the local disk (and stored in ImapMail).

The question is: how do I configure TB to run in "thin" mode, meaning after connecting a new account: - establish a directory tree - download message titles (including sender, date, etc.) -> *.msf - DO NOT download messages for local storage - start the indexing process, which will download and index the subject, from, to, and keywords in the message body (it will download and "read" the message, but not save it locally) and save it to global-messages-db.sqlite

Setting "mail.server.default.offline_download" to "false" will cause this behavior, but the message body will not be indexed (only from, to, and subject).

I tried to work around this by: - configuring the mailbox with the download option for offline use - waiting for it to download - setting "mail.server.default.offline_download" to "false" - deleting all "cur" directories (I use maildir) or deleting all *.eml files from the ImapMail directory.

Content search works for messages that have been downloaded (and indexed) previously; it doesn't work for new messages.

Why am I trying this? Some people have "air" laptops (meaning - weaker processors, small SSDs) and need access to email (via IMAP), including full search, without having all their email downloaded locally.

In other words, how can I configure TB via IMAP to: - download the directory and subdirectory tree - download the headers of all messages - "read" and index all messages (including their content) and store them in "global-messages-db.sqlite," but not store all messages locally (online mode only)?

Regards Chris

When I attempt to search for emails with a date (such as after Sept 30, 2025) in the INBOX plus subfolders (checked off), it only returns those in the INBOX. There are emails in subfolders dated after Sept 30, 2025.

If I search for a word without any date, it lists all emails. If I add a 2nd condition with a date as noted above, only the INBOX is displayed. Is this a bug?

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.

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.