[throwaway81523]

Could they just make it not suck? Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder, not all that many by today's standards. The address book doesn't let you sort the addresses by most recently added, which is important if you reply to craigslist posts which use numeric forwarding addresses. So once you have more than a handful of them the are impossible to tell apart. It automatically makes new archive folders by year (2023, 2024, 2025...) which is kind of nice, except it shows them oldest first instead of newest first, so you have to scroll way down to get to the current year. The progress bar on the bottom looks like there is constantly something going on, and maybe there is, but it never finishes. Messages sometimes fall through cracks so you can't find them in any folder but you can sometimes find them with global search. And on and on. Stop adding new features or messing up the UI further until basic functionality like this works.

[bayindirh]

> Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder, not all that many by today's standards.

My Thunderbird installation tends a 20 year old work mailbox with tens of thousands of messages, and the search works the way I want even though I don't download the messages themselves to save some disk space.

If you are using your installation for a very long time, your local caches might have broken at some point, because Thunderbird was bad at that kind of thing, but now it's not.

For folder order, I can't tell anything about it, but 13 years of folders are just a wrist-flick distance on a 2K display, and shouldn't be much worse at an 1080p one, either. So, it might be fair criticism, but it's nitpicking.

I never experienced "lost messages" for a very long time, and my progress bar is currently sitting empty, despite that installation is handling 5 busy mailboxes.

You may need to delete some cache and local MBOX files and restart your Thunderbird, it seems.

[justsomehnguy]

> Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder

I'm in the inbox, I see an email with 'word' in the Subject in some of the most recent emails.

I type 'word' in the search box and TB finds some emails from the years ago.

It's even worse if it is 'word and some another word', in this case it doesn't even find anything.

It's like the developers... aren't dogfooding their own product?

Oh, yeah, we do now have TWO search boxes. Because that makes sense. And if you disable the topmost one, there is now 30px of wasted space you cannot reclaim. Because you definitely NEED that hamburger menu on the RIGHT side. On the desktop. On the 4k+ monitor. Riiight.

[dreamcompiler]

The two search boxes is bizarre. It feels like two rival programmers each wrote a half-baked search feature and rather than management telling them "Unify your two approaches", instead they said "Just throw them both in there and let the user figure out which one they want."

[1718627440]

There aren't two search boxes. There is a search box in/below the titlebar and a filter for the current folder.

[justsomehnguy]

And if there were two driving wheels in your car, a one for turning right and an other one for turning left you would say there is no two driving wheels in your car.

[1718627440]

A filter is different from searching. It only works on the current directory, it alters the view after it has been generated. You can also use it on a search.

Don't know about others, but I find the functionality useful and use them for different purposes. Searching is when I want to find random messages, where I don't know where or from when there are, the filter is for bulk processing and narrowing the current working set, beside the conversation level.

It is more like the steering wheel and choosing forward/reverse, sure both are for choosing the driving direction, but they operate at different levels and are used in different situations. I mean you could use the steering wheel for forward/backward if you want to. Using the gear to change the direction less than 180° is quite difficult, but not impossible.

[justsomehnguy]

You are just trying to confirm your beliefs.

Thing is, the 'filter' box can work as a filter and as a search box. It's even a simple heuristic if it should behave as a filter or switch to the search - if there is no result for the text entered in the textbox then switch to the search.

There is zero need to have two search boxes, it's just Mozilla wanted to copy-paste the idiotic solution of MS Office with a top-most search function. That's all.

[9cb14c1ec0]

The search is really limited by the storage backend Thunderbird is using. Would really love to see something with full text search support, like sqlite.

[bachmeier]

My workaround for Thunderbird search is to open the Outlook web client, search for what I need, find it in a fraction of a second, do what I need to do, and close the web client. Terrible "solution" but the only one that works.

[isaachinman]

Check out what we're building: https://marcoapp.io

Basically a cross-platform Thunderbird replacement whose sole goal is to "not suck". Full-text search is entirely client side (not via IMAP) and returns results in single-digit ms.

[kiririn]

>Full-text search is entirely client side (not via IMAP)

Setting up server-side Xapian full-text search and disabling the crap client-side one in Thunderbird was one of the best improvements I made to my email usability. What makes your client-side search better? It's usually not speed I'm looking for, but rather precision, such as double quoted phrases (sorely missing from Thunderbird's client-side search), filtering by a mixture of things, etc.

I wish more clients had an option for server-side-only search (looking at you, iOS Mail.app) and/or had a nice UI for it (ctrl+shift+f dialog in Thunderbird is janky but gets results)

[isaachinman]

We're using Orama for client-side search, which is best in class as far as we can tell, after quite an extensive period of research.

It is able to use BM25, QPS, or PT15.

We're still playing around with various weights/settings, but have seen fantastic results so far.

What do you mean by "double quoted phrases"? Do you mean the ability to search for an _exact_ term?

[NoImmatureAdHom]

It needs to be open source. If it's not open source, it's a trap.

[encom]

>not suck

>web-tech

Pick one.

I couldn't find any info on whether this is FOSS or what license it uses.

[throwaway81523]

The fastmail web client is actually decent as such things go, and its search works ok. When I have trouble with Thunderbird search I sometimes log into Fastmail and use their web client.