4 ms·

Really? I don't remember having any major problems with search recently. Search is a few orders of magnitude better than the junk mail classification, at leas

Really? I don't remember having any major problems with search recently. Search is a few orders of magnitude better than the junk mail classification, at least for me. I don't know what algorithms they use for junk classification, but here are some observations: 1) I mark 100% of the emails from a particular sender or with a particular subject line as junk, yet the junk classifier still puts emails from that sender or with that subject in my inbox. This is the low-hanging fruit -- the stuff that is so obvious that it is spam that a human can figure it out without looking at the message body at all, yet Thunderbird can't seem to get it right no matter how much you train it. I can only guess that they are placing too much weight on the body content (which is easily padded with hidden text to con the algorithm) when a bad sender/subject should trump whatever is in the body. 2) Emails from people that I've emailed in the past sometimes end up in the junk folder. I thought they were supposed to be whitelisted automatically (by automatically being appended to some special section of your address book). 3) I've implemented message filters to detect certain words like our product name and move the incoming message to a high-priority folder, yet messages that should match the filter still end up in the junk folder on rare occasions (and, yes, I have it configured to run the filter before junk classification is applied -- I'm assuming that junk classification should not be applied if a filter moves the message out of the inbox). 4) It sometimes seems to just stop learning, so I have to reset and retrain the junk classifier or it gets to the point where the only emails that it recognizes as being junk are the ones in a foreign language.

qznc 12y ago
My problems with search: 1) It shows me two search fields and irritatingly I need them both. One is the global search in the index. The other searches linearly per folder without an index. 2) If you disable local caching for IMAP, it does not index the emails, so the global search reports nothing. (if you enable caching it regularly goes out of sync with the server and behaves weird) 3) Linear search through an email folder in 2015? It is slow, for full text search. Altogether, no fast full text search in Thunderbird for me. Compare that to Gmail, where it works great.
- e15ctr0n 12y ago
  You really should take advantage of the global search index feature of Thunderbird. It's possible that your index is corrupt, too large and so may not be functioning correctly. You can rebuild it by following the steps here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-datab...
bane 12y ago
Yeah, search is a huge mess. For example, I'm out looking for houses and I've gotten a bunch of notices in the past couple weeks for open houses. I search for "open house" and not a single result it presented was for any of the emails I've previously received. In fact none of the emails it returned seemed to have either "open" or "house" in them, I have no idea why it selected the emails it did. Actually, I've developed a theory that the search actually uses a stochastic method that randomly samples emails from my mailboxes in the hopes that some of them will match my search result.
- e15ctr0n 12y ago
  Search for open+house or "open house". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search#w_examples https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search#w_example...
- asutherland 12y ago
  Assuming you're using the global search mechanism, a porter stemmer is used which means that the search engine sees all of "house", "houses", "housed", "housing", etc. the same. The search also biases the results based on recency and things like whether the message has been starred/flagged, whether it was authored by/involves contacts in your address book, etc. e15ctr0n is right that your best option is to use quotes to do a phrase search of "open house" in this situation, although you will still run afoul of the porter stemmer. (Unfortunately a post-pass filter if you realllly want "house" was never implemented. There is an open bug, however.)
  - bane 12y ago
    No, I mean, I actually searched for "open house" in quotes. (I tried the terms without quotes as well, but when that first set of results turned up useless I tried the quotes). The results were literally what I describe, just a random sample of emails from the last few years. I keep using the search hoping I get something useful returned, and even when I do things like put in exact phrases I know are in the message, I get a random pile of junk back. I should just learn my lesson and stop trying to be honest.

qznc 12y ago

My problems with search: 1) It shows me two search fields and irritatingly I need them both. One is the global search in the index. The other searches linearly per folder without an index. 2) If you disable local caching for IMAP, it does not index the emails, so the global search reports nothing. (if you enable caching it regularly goes out of sync with the server and behaves weird) 3) Linear search through an email folder in 2015? It is slow, for full text search. Altogether, no fast full text search in Thunderbird for me. Compare that to Gmail, where it works great.

e15ctr0n 12y ago
You really should take advantage of the global search index feature of Thunderbird. It's possible that your index is corrupt, too large and so may not be functioning correctly. You can rebuild it by following the steps here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-datab...

bane 12y ago

Yeah, search is a huge mess. For example, I'm out looking for houses and I've gotten a bunch of notices in the past couple weeks for open houses. I search for "open house" and not a single result it presented was for any of the emails I've previously received. In fact none of the emails it returned seemed to have either "open" or "house" in them, I have no idea why it selected the emails it did. Actually, I've developed a theory that the search actually uses a stochastic method that randomly samples emails from my mailboxes in the hopes that some of them will match my search result.

e15ctr0n 12y ago
Search for open+house or "open house". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search#w_examples https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search#w_example...
asutherland 12y ago
Assuming you're using the global search mechanism, a porter stemmer is used which means that the search engine sees all of "house", "houses", "housed", "housing", etc. the same. The search also biases the results based on recency and things like whether the message has been starred/flagged, whether it was authored by/involves contacts in your address book, etc. e15ctr0n is right that your best option is to use quotes to do a phrase search of "open house" in this situation, although you will still run afoul of the porter stemmer. (Unfortunately a post-pass filter if you realllly want "house" was never implemented. There is an open bug, however.)
- bane 12y ago
  No, I mean, I actually searched for "open house" in quotes. (I tried the terms without quotes as well, but when that first set of results turned up useless I tried the quotes). The results were literally what I describe, just a random sample of emails from the last few years. I keep using the search hoping I get something useful returned, and even when I do things like put in exact phrases I know are in the message, I get a random pile of junk back. I should just learn my lesson and stop trying to be honest.