4 ms·

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 ca

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.

berkes 3y ago
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.
reacharavindh 3y ago
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?
- WhyNotHugo 3y ago
  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.
  - zvmaz 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - throw10920 3y ago
      "You can do it yourself" is never an acceptable reply to a criticism of a piece of software.
  - rajamaka 3y ago
    [flagged]
badsectoracula 3y ago
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.
- conaclos 3y ago
  Same here. I am exclusively using the quick filter box (Ctrl+Shift+K). I would like that the filter bar be never hidden.
  - NoboruWataya 3y ago
    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.
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
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.
tmikaeld 3y ago
They can start with not hanging the UI when searching for keywords in body, I don't understand why this is so hard.
dermesser 3y ago
Not to detract from Thunderbird's deserved attention, but I've been using Evolution for many years, and search is delightfully instantaneous.
ohuf 3y ago
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
no_time 3y ago
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.

berkes 3y ago

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.

reacharavindh 3y ago

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?

WhyNotHugo 3y ago
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.
- zvmaz 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - throw10920 3y ago
    "You can do it yourself" is never an acceptable reply to a criticism of a piece of software.
- rajamaka 3y ago
  [flagged]

badsectoracula 3y ago

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.

conaclos 3y ago
Same here. I am exclusively using the quick filter box (Ctrl+Shift+K). I would like that the filter bar be never hidden.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago
  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.

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago

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.

tmikaeld 3y ago

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

dermesser 3y ago

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

ohuf 3y ago

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

no_time 3y ago

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.