1602071 - Incorporate the features of the "Expression Search / Google Mail UI" Add-on into TB

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 538821

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Josh]

Attachment: Expression Search Example.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

This is a request to incorporate the features of a search plugin named "Expression Search / Google Mail UI" into Thunderbird. This plugin is fantastic - it allows Gmail-like search expressions such "to:mom body:christmas" to be used in any email folder, and it filters and displays only matching results directly in the folder pane. It saves so much time and has become indispensable to more than just me. However, the author seems to have moved on from upgrading for new versions of Thunderbird. It still works with Thunderbird 68, but only if you disable it and re-enable it and then restart Thunderbird every day.

I think incorporating the features of this plug-in into Thunderbird would be a tremendous improvement to the search functionality. It seems to make use of search functionality that is already in TB.

Here is some more detailed information about the Add-on. I'd encourage any developers to at least try this extension or see the attached screenshot.

The Add-on page is below. But to get it working now, you have to follow these steps.

1. Install in TB 68 (not sure if it works in later versions)
2. Start TB
3. Go Tools > Add-Ons and DISABLE the extension
4. Re-enable it again.
5. Quit and restart TB.

The Add-on page is here: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gmailui/

The Github repository for the Add-on is here (and hats-off to WangVisual for his creation, it's really fantastic): https://github.com/wangvisual/expression-search

A recent discussion thread that started when the Add-on began failing is here. You can see it has some enthusiastic fans: https://github.com/wangvisual/expression-search/issues/80#issuecomment-562559516

Please see the attached file for a screenshot.

Thanks for considering it, and best regards.

Comment 1

[Josh]

PS - for some reason the Add-on gets disabled every time I shut down the computer. So to use the Add-on you have to do these steps every time you start TB after having shut down.

1. Start TB
2. Go Tools > Add-Ons and DISABLE the extension
3. Re-enable it again.
4. Quit and restart TB.

Comment 2

[philippe.garteiser]

Thanks Josh for this initiative, and of course thanks and congrats to WangVisual for having thought up and implemented this awesome addon in the first place.
Myself and colleagues find that the functions of this addon would be a very valuable addition to Thunderbird. It makes tracing and searching email extremely easy. When the compatibility broke I lost a lot of interest towards thunderbird and have very reluctantly began to search for an alternative.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Complete and clear bug report, but please don't file duplicate bug reports. Instead, use existing bug 538821