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Comment by diarrhea | Hacker News Reader

Putting the search bar front-and-center in both the application and this announcement, I hope the backend implementation is now able to keep up?

The one use case I switch to my mail provider's webmail UI for is search. I mentally sigh a little bit each time I realise I have to search through my email. Thunderbird's search has been among the worst I have ever come across, sadly. Functional search would be a killer feature. As it's running locally, heck, give me regex. Trivial to implement and would be a huge improvement already.

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Yeah. It's been terrible forever. Either returning far too much, far too little, or both.

I've often just resorted to grep on an export of mail directories to find that one email. I even once imported the mails (ugly bash and Ruby hacks) in meilisearch to actually find stuff.

It surprises me that it's possible to have a search experience that's worse than manually grepping through directories.

I have always wondered this. When a site like "MAterial for Mkdocs" can implement such a featureful search (with autocomplete, spellcorrect and such) in a browser for a website, how could it be this hard for a desktop application with several orders of magnitude of resources at its disposal?

There’s no technical reason, it’s just a poor implementation.

I use “notmuch” for email and it can index over two decades of emails in seconds. Search is then instantaneous.

TBH, thunderbird could just use notmuch under the hood.

One thing i've noticed is that the search bar is awful at finding anything, but the search tool (Ctrl+Shift+F) works much better.

Same here. I am exclusively using the quick filter box (Ctrl+Shift+K). I would like that the filter bar be never hidden.

Filter is awesome. It's more limited in what you can search but it's blazingly fast and pretty much always does the job for me.

I prefer thunderbird because of the search functionality. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just consider it the least worst, they’re all horribly bad.

As a relatively new TB user, I thought it was me who was "holding it wrong" lol. Searching for my employer's name and it only returning my career portal applications but not actually their emails (that were from their domain, with their name appearing atleast twice in text) was baffling.

I'm very hopeful about this new version. I can already see one of my U/X gripes fixed in the screenshot.

They can start with not hanging the UI when searching for keywords in body, I don't understand why this is so hard.

The only issue I have with TB search is the setting for the results presentation: why is there not a preferences option to set if the results show as list or in the current default 'verbose' view?

switching to list view manually seems so inefficient

Not to detract from Thunderbird's deserved attention, but I've been using Evolution for many years, and search is delightfully instantaneous.

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