Thunderbird search improvements

[tony2murray]

Suggest: 

- Conduct a study of the effectiveness of the current email search options in Thunderbird. Possibly in comparison to other mail providers (Gmail Outlook et. al.)

- Explore how to effectively combine the two search options - quick search and full search - to avoid confusion, or to clearly differentiate between the two

- Full search does not seem to search messages by subject (?) - quick search does find the subject.

- In full-search, suggest to sort by date (most recent first) rather than relevance - 'sort by relevance' does not work well (for me)

- Generally: Unfortunately I often cannot find a particular message in Thunderbird whereas for example, Gmail (web) has better search.  Gmail has useful search filters such as 'Custom date range'. 

[wsm]

Hi @tony2murray I have changed your discussion item to an idea, where it can be voted on.  I can tell you that redoing search is high on the list of things to improve, but first we are working on a new database that will help make this improvement possible.

Also, I know there are other search ideas here in connect, so it is possible your idea will be merged with others in the future.  

[SignDesign]

I would also like to add that it appears that full search has some limitations on the string it searches for. So I regularly have emails with people from HP, like the printer company. So I wanted to find all emails with "hp.com" in them. But apparently the dot was treated as wildcard (?) and I was returned every email - because they all had "com" somewhere in them (signatures). Very unhelpful. I realize a 2 letter string is could return too many results. But even trying quote "hp.com" unquote returned almost all emails, including ones without HP. Searching for only HP returned no results, so likely 2 characters is too short to search (makes sense, except for me). Would be nice to know the rules of search, or a way to search for 2 letters, or disallow the dot as wildcard but use as literal.