News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by diarrhea on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:26AM (#36664844)
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.

Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by badsectoracula on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:41AM (#36664974)
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.
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by conaclos on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:52AM (#36665051)
Same here. I am exclusively using the quick filter box (Ctrl+Shift+K). I would like that the filter bar be never hidden.
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by NoboruWataya on Monday July 10, 2023 @09:38AM (#36666237)
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.
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by reacharavindh on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:37AM (#36664953)
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?
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by WhyNotHugo on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:46AM (#36665014)
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.

Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by zvmaz on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:53AM (#36665063)
> There’s no technical reason, it’s just a poor implementation.

> TBH, thunderbird could just use notmuch under the hood.

You could provide us with a plugin that does just that.

Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by throw10920 on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:07PM (#36674249)
"You can do it yourself" is never an acceptable reply to a criticism of a piece of software.
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by rajamaka on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:58AM (#36665095)
Looking forward to your PR
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by berkes on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:33AM (#36664919)
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.

Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by hsbauauvhabzb on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:54AM (#36665069)
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.
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by tmikaeld on Monday July 10, 2023 @08:07AM (#36665172)
They can start with not hanging the UI when searching for keywords in body, I don't understand why this is so hard.
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by dermesser on Monday July 10, 2023 @09:55AM (#36666507)
Not to detract from Thunderbird's deserved attention, but I've been using Evolution for many years, and search is delightfully instantaneous.
Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by ohuf on Monday July 10, 2023 @10:31AM (#36667017)
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

Re:What’s New in Thunderbird 115 by no_time on Monday July 10, 2023 @10:33AM (#36667053)
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.