1175855 - Global search should accept quotation marks around expressions to search for exact phrase/string

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[HPVD]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150525141253

Steps to reproduce:

search for e.g. "2 fach" (with quotation marks)


Actual results:

emails containing anywhere the part "2" and on any other place the part "fach" were found


Expected results:

only find emails containing the full expression "2 fach" (both parts together separated by a space character)

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

which search are we talking about?

quicksearch
advanced search
Global search

Comment 2

[HPVD]

1. quick filter
(filter field, used to reduce number of emails shown):
works fine

2. global search
(standard search field searches in all accounts + all folders und show results on extra page with possibilities to filter):
shows the problem

3. advanced search
(do not know exactly what this is):
?

Comment 3

[HPVD]

Attachment: shows the problem

attachment shows the problem on result page of global search

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Yes HPVD, thanks for requesting this. Global search, albeit powerful in scope, is still quite rudimentary when it comes to finetuning the search. I'm not sure if we'll find the manpower to change that soon, but it's a worthwhile request and imo actually crucial functionality.

Comment 5

[mjsulik]

I would like to second this issue for Thunderbird 60.6.1. Being able to search for multi-word strings would be a nice feature.

Comment 6

[MarjaE]

I'm surprised that the 2 was showing up, in light of bug 1134629.

Comment 7

[u508355]

I'm using Thunderbird 78.6.1 and I assume this issue still has not been addressed after more than 6 years? I'm not even sure this qualifies as a bug anymore. Maybe a feature?

I don't even care anymore about this feature not working. My issue is that the documentation says that it's supposed to work. If no one is every going to add this feature then maybe the documentation should be updated to reflect the way global search actually works.

Here is the link to the official documentation page for the global search feature:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search

"
Searching for multiple terms

Enter multiple terms in the search box. Thunderbird will search for messages that contain at least one occurrence of each of the specified terms. If you enclose multiple terms within quotation marks, Thunderbird will search for the words as a phrase. That is, the search results will only contain messages that have all the words in the order they are specified in the search field. These two types of searches can be combined. For example, if you enter:

converting "imap pop"

...Thunderbird will find emails that contain the term "converting" and the phrase "imap pop".
"