After weeks of testing and frigging around, I am now able to conclude without any doubt, Thunderbird is broken and unusable if you need a functional global search to work.
It doesn’t work. I can find emails with Quick Filter (if I know which folder they are in) but global search can’t find them no matter what I try (from address, subject, body). I have done everything they suggest, rebuilt index many times etc. It’s just fubar.
Does anyone here use Betterbird and if so, could they comment on whether it has a better (i.e. working) search facility?
Since I doubt that, i may have to look at other email programs, from what limited choice there is if you need nested local folders, and a few fiters/rules.
I have to say, as much as I love Fedora, nothing has pushed me closer to the excrutiating idea of ‘going back to Mac’ more than the email issue. I SO badly miss Mac Mail, at least for it’s functionality. Every day, about 20 times, I’d just type into the search box and it would pull up ANY and ALL messages containing that string. Duh, like a search should!
Why is there nothing comparable on Linux?!
Sorry for the rant, I know it’s nobody’s fault in here! After all these weeks and with email being how i manage pretty much everything I do, I am at my wits end! But I won’t be going back to Mac, EVEN IF I have to keep my old iMac on desk just for email (which is a dire idea!)
I am the opposite. I dont like the search behavior of the global search at all and miss a lot of customizability, as I currently just use the filterbar search.
What mail protocol are you using? Are these mails all locally stored?
How long are they stored? Did thunderbird already do this “to keep being fast Thunderbird needs to compress your mails” thing?
What version of thunderbird are you using? Did you try the Flatpak?
Thanks. I am confident it’s not a local system issue. 16GB of RAM I think (if not, 32). Latest TB version 128.0.1esr, tried every way of installing, now using RPM to get it to work properly (opening PDFs etc), thousands of emails, maybe tens of thousands but not hundreds. Around 20 local folders.
It fails to find stuff in imap servers or local. Sometimes it works, but sometimes just doesn’t find an email I know is there. After an hour of hunting for it and finding it, i search again and doesn’t find it, tried various strings, from details, subject details, body text quotes, nope. It’s just SHITE!
I looked at it, it seems to just expand the intelligence of the search queries. I don’t need that. I am taking exact quotes from body of an email, and it doesn’t find, so I am not sure this will help with that. May still try it, i was hoping it was actually a new indexer of some kind, Gloda seems defective to me.
I’ve played around with Betterbird and liked it; it seems the developers have either fixed or triaged a lot of Thunderbird’s search behind-the-scenes search issues.
Thanks very much. That’s useful, I may just give Betterbird a whirl. I did ask the dev and he gave an answer that didn’t inspire enough confidence for me to spend time testing a new program that’s got the same Gloda code behind it, but I still might have a go. His reply when i asked him if BB was better at search than TB, reads…
The answer is: yes and no.
The “no” part: BB has inherited the two searches: “normal search”, that is QF, folder search and filters, and global search (Gloda). The latter is a “fine” piece of code, abandoned by its original author and totally opaque to and untouched by all living developers. What works, works, what doesn’t work, won’t get fixed. That said, I’m not aware of cases where Gloda doesn’t find stuff if the index is intact/rebuilt. If there is a reproducible problem, it should be reported to Thunderbird.
The “yes” part: In BB there are various improvements, like searching encrypted messages and ignoring diacritics, normal search with regular expressions and complex terms (and/or) mixed. All that of course doesn’t solve any Gloda issues.
Hmm. IIRC, this is the one that royally pi55ed me off! I asked on all their support channels whether I can have LOCAL folders (nested and manually creatable/deletable just like TB or Mac Mail), and I got a week of ambiguous answers, nobody would commit to a YES! I was told you can set up a ‘local mail account’, something I have never heard of, then some seemingly complex ‘hack’ to make that run but without a real ‘account’ behind, just to benefit from the folders, some of which are not deletable and created automatically, but with the benefit of being able to manually add some more. That hellish discussion, combined with my dread of converting all my years of email/folders etc into a whole new program, put me off at the time.
That said, I JUST MIGHT have to look again now!! Thanks for the reminder
I see now thanks. In that case, ‘filter’ is no use to me at all, i need to search for emails which could be in any one of 20+ folders. So I am forced to use global, or at least I would be, if the damn thing worked!
Aah, sorry, I thought you were typing ‘expressions’ instead of names or words in the search! Duh, its the name of the extension you suggested, sorry!
Having said that, I really don’t see how the addon can help here, if I am wrong please shout and I will try, but I am so limited on time and i see it requires learning a load of new shortcuts (this brain is overloaded already!) such as “t:” and “f:”… It just sounds like a headache which will still rely on what appears to be a broken Gloda system
You’re right… the dev’s response in re. BB doesn’t inspire much confidence. I don’t generally use search much since it seems to suck on all email apps; that is, if I absolutely need to do a global search, I’ll use the web app for the email service.
Is there any particular reason you need (or want) local folder storage?
I’ve also played around a bit with Mailspring, but I don’t know if its search features meet your needs.
Have you looked at Geary? Again, I don’t know if that’s any “better” than BB…
Thanks. I can’t/don’t/won’t do webmail stuff. I have 20 plus years of carefully organised business and personal mail, I am not paying to host that in a cloud that can be hacked when I have perfectly good computers on my desk and I never go out (wife doesn’t let me :D)
So yep I do need local folders, and that seems to be my downfall as more and more people switch to cloud/web based stuff, and most peiople these days don’t use email as extensively as I do/have done. just a sign of the times I guess, sadly, from my perspective anyway!
Geary - Pretty sure I ruled that one out for lack of local folders but will double check, I am sure it woin’t work for one reason or another.
Well maybe I have been spoiled! Mac Mail was 100% perfect, reliable, functional. Which really shouldn’t be hard to do, but seems to be rare the more i look around for alternatives!
PS - I hate to say it but I may just one day have to consider uploading 30GB of email to a damn service, to make it searchable! The thought fills me with dread, but needs (may) must soon!
PPS - I also make use of email filters/rules. I had about 20-25 on Mac Mail which I am slowly building again in TB, they seem to work ok, to file emails in certain local folders as they come in.
By the way, in case it’s of use to anyone reading…
About the only useful piece of info i got from Mozilla sarcastic swines in response to my complaints was…
Apparently the global search ignores two letter words, only searches for 3 letter words. that explains how I wasted hours after copying the phrase ‘VB to XF’ from one my emails tucked away in an old local folder and using that as my test for the global search for a while before hearing that it wouldn’t work anyway!
3 letters minimum, worth knowing. (not that it then found the emails when I used longer words from the target email!)
hahaha. reading the reviews of Expression-NG - MANY of them sound exactly like me. So many people say ‘the only thing that makes it usable’, or ‘the one reason I can stay with Thunderbird’! So I want to install. I go to AddOns in TB and search for ‘expression’, no mention of it! Probably another bunch of people Thunderbird devs have fallen out with or have some other peculiar gripe with.
I think I can ‘install from file’ so trying that, based on the reviews it MAY just be a solution and make it usable!
