- Issue: Make it easier to determine space usage of emailers, search for emails by wildcard domain(, or subject, or any other SPECIFIC field) from main Global Search Bar
- Environment: MacOS Monterey + Thunderbird.app v140.8.0esr (aarch64)
- Description: Currently if one wants to search for all emails from a certain domain (NOT a specific email address), you cannot use the "Global Search Bar":
... you MUST use "Classic Search" (Cmd-Shift-F):
The problem with this is this window does not give a size total of all shown or selected messages:
... unlike the search results given by doing a generic "Global Search Bar" (Cmd-K) search (which BTW, why does the histogram not at least show a scale on the y-axis to make the frequencies at least useful to compare against other emailers?? 🤯):
and THEN:
1. clicking "Show results as list" and then hitting Cmd-A (select All)- assuming the Global Search didn't match other random emails that had the domain search text in the contents of it (which DOES happen!).
2. SCROLLING all the way to the bottom of the list on right sidebar.
Only THEN, does one see all the way at the bottom right of the status bar, in super tiny text, of the total size of emails selected:
This last piece of information is what I am really looking for and currently requires a lot of steps to evaluate how much space I will save when deleting these messages ("yes", you could "delete" it, then look in Trash and check the size from there only to potentially undelete it, but it's making an already lengthy procedure even more convoluted).
- Why this is important?: I have an email account that I use to subscribe to many commercial vendors, ex: restaurants, online shopping sites, deals, etc. It ends up accumulating a lot of email which I periodically try to cull old messages to stay within my cloud provider's free email storage limits (and "no", I don't wish to upgrade to a paid plan when the issue is just a matter of culling old dated / now irrelevant emails). One might say "well, unsubscribe!", but that doesn't address people that still wish to be informed of by staying subscribed. The issue isn't one particular emailer (in this example using 38.4 MB), but more so making it easier to deal with the "jet hose" of multiple emailers that you wish to still stay informed but intelligently manage the space usage if the information eventually becomes irrelevant.
- Workarounds attempted: I found a very cool & beautiful add-on called "Third Stats" that very visually allows you to render emailer's frequency but sadly falls short of actually showing total mail sizes for a given emailer or category.
- Possible Improvements:
- Add GMail like search prefixes that can be recognized in the Global Search Bar, ex: `from:`, `subject:`, etc.
- Add a # count to the y-axis when histogram results
- Provide a "Grand Perspective" like view:
... of one's emails to allow one to easily see which emailers are the most space consuming - Allow one to setup some sort of periodic UI-based cron job(s) to delete emails from a specific domain/email address.
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