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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

The search is unusable -- wedding finds 'weds'. There is no way to do exact searching. I reported this 5 years ago, lots of other people have complained about the stemming, there has been no fix.

There is no support for outlook/exchange. Not saying it's trivial, but it's useful in the modern era.

IMAP folder support is very flakey, I reported some bugs but nothing got fixed.

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There is a plugin for Exchange [0]. It works.

The search is really weird. I had to install an extension to always filter by date but even then it's broken to the point where I have to open webmail to do real searches.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/exquilla-...

I'm trying to keep an offline copy of my inbox using IMAP. I changed every setting I could find (like no cache limit, download the entire message instead of just the headers, ignore message age, don't delete any messages) and it still wants to download entire folders from time to time instead of just the changes. Maybe I did something wrong but that's my experience with IMAP support. It's also pretty slow but that might be some Gmail limitation.

It sounds like search needs a patch bounty, but it would be ridiculous to rewrite Thunderbird because search is naively implemented.

I've never had problems with IMAP, nor do I use Exchange, so I can't speak to those...

And thankfully, there's a Lucene-in-C (which I haven't personally had a need to use, but Lucene as a project is awesome), so the patch might not even be terribly large unless their current search implementation is splattered all over the app

https://lucy.apache.org

The search is not unusable, I use it every day. It could be better though, and I get the feeling it could plan the query more efficiently too. I think it needs a better query syntax for those hard to find e-mails.

I agree about search, but I don't think that rewrite using web technologies is good solution to this particular problem.

Have you tried Expression Search?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmailui/

Yeah, the search box is just ignored by me - I use the 'quick filter' box instead, because it's possible to understand how the results match the query.

>There is no support for outlook/exchange. Not saying it's trivial, but it's useful in the modern era.

http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

It may not be an "ideal" solution in that it requires a second program running, but given that you're working with a closed, non-standard protocol, that's kinda par for the course.

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