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Comment by fswd | Hacker News Reader

Please fix search. It's completely broken and unusable IMHO.

I still receive the occasional email from this bug report, about being able to force excluding undesired noise from search results:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844

It's been open for, I don't know, 5 or 6 years? (checks the link... yup, actually 11)

Another one I'm subscribed too, also related to search and discovery, is this one about using boolean operators:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297852

I commented in a recent thread about GitHub at last being able to search for "WORD" and finding "-DWORD" in results, they took somewhere around 6 years since I had the need, so it was a welcome improvement... so maybe 2023 will be "the year of search on the desktop" and Thunderbird will start improving its UX for searching emails? Who knows.

Meanwhile, it's been my go-to email client for ages, despite this shortcoming which I had to learn to live with. The UI for searching past emails is very bad, so ironically I ended up changing habits to avoid having to search at all (not the ideal outcome of using a tool, but here we are)

> I ended up changing habits to avoid having to search at all (not the ideal outcome of using a tool, but here we are)

I may have gone to an even greater extreme. I installed a webmail front-end for the sole purpose of searching my emails. I use TBird for everything else.

Because I usually know which folder contains what I'm searching for, 98% of the time I'm able to find what I'm looking for quickly using the filter bar. This ends up being a much better experience for me than the search tool.

Because the filter bar doesn't put you in a new UI, you keep the benefits of continuing to use list/message panes: (a) UI context not lost, (b) the matches shows as a list, not the hard-to-scan context results that are default in search, (c) clicking on matches shows the email in the message panel, allowing you to quickly find the right message. The filter bar also lets you quickly toggle if your filter term is the recipient, sender, subject line, or message body.

I wish the UI design of the filter bar could be the basic search tool, expanded in some way to allow for search within multiple/all folders, and slightly more complex searches (specify filters for person AND subject line). Perhaps when you click on the profile in the mailbox panel, the filter bar continues to show, letting you search on all folders. If in a parent folder, there could be a checkbox to show/filter all messages in child folders.

The existing search UI could still exist and be used for advanced searching.

While we are complaining about search-related issues: I constantly end up with messages that I know I have received, that the search might or might not list, but that then can not be opened until I run "repair folder". Happens with multiple accounts with different providers.

Still better than all alternatives I have tried though :D

They are working on a big UI over hall so this mite get fixt. you can test it out in the beta

I use Postbox which basically runs on Thunderbird I believe but has some professional tooling : https://www.postbox-inc.com/

I started using it when Thunderbird went under the previous time.

Too bad there's no Linux port.

Yeah absolutely. Perhaps you could suggest it, they seem to be responsive on the whole!

That would be fantastic. Thunderbird's search is indeed pretty much worthless.

The trick is to use the quick filter instead.

That only works in a single folder. Yes, I have a huge inbox and love quick filter for it, but the global search hits all my accounts and archives and for all it's faults, is very fast.

Do they use SQLite fulltext for search? If not, that would be an opportunity.

useless for CJK

Thanks. I had to Google CJK so I'll leave it here:

> CJK stands for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

I keep trying to use Thunderbird as my Fastmail client, but whenever I need to do a search I end up switching to the http client in frustration.

Maybe I just don’t understand how search works in Thunderbird though!

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