1373410 - Search results inconsistent

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1245532

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel MacOS X 10.12; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170413192749

Steps to reproduce:

Attempted to search for a message using the "search messages" facility.
In "search messages", the application does not find messages that should be in results. This happens seemingly at random - some messages are happily found, some not.


Actual results:

When searching for a fairly recent message, with a very distinct string (or even any of many strings within the message), the result is "Not Found". I can perform the same search with the "Run Search on server" option enabled - and the message is still not found. I have gone through the steps to delete the global-messages-db.sqlite and rebuild it (waiting the appropriate amount of time for it to finish catalogueing eight gigs of emails).

I'm systems admin of the server the email resides on. I am using IMAP. All messages are downloaded to my local PC/Mac. I can go onto the server, into my mailbox, and grep for the string, and it is found.


Expected results:

consistent find of strings in messages.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Yes, we know that IMAP *body* searches are not reliable. That's the "normal" search also used by the quick filter.

Global search is different, so rebuilding the Gloda index won't have effects on the normal body search.

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

Okay, thanks. I wasn't aware that body searches were not considered reliable (I did do a search before posting this bug, but didn't narrow it to 'body'). I guess what I'm seeing then is significantly _worse_ reliability, because in the past .... well to the best of my knowledge, the results tended to be good.