1690657 - Incomplete results when searching on display name

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 460737

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[ewrpurchases]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.2 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Search for all messages with Joe Blow in from field

Actual results:

Search returns 2 messages

Expected results:

Expected to see 20 messages. By checking the source of several messages, I can see that the search is only returning messages in which the sender has included his display name. When he sends from [e-mail], the display name comes from my address book. Would like to be able to search on display name, wherever it comes from.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Hey ewrpurchases, you are 100% right. I have advocated for that bug since time immemorial, but I'm not sure if everyone fully appreciates the massive UX failure of this issue. We cannot expect TB users to search for things they cannot even see in the message (with TB default settings). Having to search for things which are not under my control (display name, if any, which sender uses in his from address) violates the whole point of "prefer display name from my AB", and as you say, it leads to cunning search failures where some logically matching messages are shown but others are not. It's just a PITA. I encourage you to describe your scenario and frustration in bug 460737 (keep it short). That said, this may not be trivial to fix.