Open Bug 1170050 Opened 10 years ago Updated 9 months ago

Global searching for multiple email addresses associated to same contact or domain

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

37 Branch
All
Unspecified
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

People

(Reporter: mitra_lists, Unassigned)

Details

Many times, as I start to type someone's name into a search box, it offers multiple email addresses. They are often both on the same directory record - but not always (mostly because of the bug limiting directory records to 2 email addresses). The same thing happens if I search @xyz.com to see what emails I have from a certain company. Often the simple "Messages mentioning" option doesn't work as desired (for example if I look for John Smith I'll get 100's of messages most of which just contain the words "John" and "Smith" in different places, In almost all these cases I have to perform the search twice, once for each email address shown. It would be great if there was an option to search for messages from any of the email address shown - I know I'd almost always use that option if it was available. I think it would be great to
Indeed that's a great idea although we'd be kind of working around the current shortcomings of the AB. (I suggested that as early as 2009 at a Thunderbird workshop during Moz EU conference.) Mitra, given the restraints of the current AB and UI, any ideas for the most simple implementation UI-wise? It's probably not hard to trigger that search if we can find a minimally intrusive UI.
Summary: Searching for multiple email addresses → Global searching for multiple email addresses
Btw, are you aware that the Quick Filter Bar has OR functionality? Use "a@b.com | b@c.com" as a filter term without quotes. You could also set up a saved search covering multiple source folders to realize that in a cross-folder way, which would be slower than global search, but it should work anyway.
Summary: Global searching for multiple email addresses → Global searching for multiple email addresses associated to same contact or domain
Severity: normal → S3

@Thomas, the best way to trigger it would be from the search bar - that's where people would look for it typically - "Search on all of these addresses" would be the simplest and catch pretty much all the cases I can think of.

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