The (gloda) search seems to handle short e-mail address strings poorly
Categories
(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)
Tracking
(Not tracked)
People
(Reporter: el, Unassigned)
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(1 file)
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41.91 KB,
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Screenshot 2025-08-03 at 8.44.59 PM.png
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/136.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Steps to reproduce:
The search seems to handle e-mails or partial e-mails poorly. During my tests, if I enter a full e-mail or a clear fragment, it just takes text parts that are completely unrelated and presents results where it's impossible to find the actually relevant results.
A few examples:
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If you search "info@test.de" it will list results showing the single word "info" and the single word "test" and the word fragment "de", completely disjointed. I struggle to think of a scenario where that is useful, especially when the actual matches aren't the top results.
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When I enter the search term "@dm.de" I get zero results, even though I sent e-mails ending with that suffix, and if I use the quick filter instead they show up.
All of these work in the quick filter, but that one doesn't work across multiple folders and therefore isn't a substitute quite often.
Actual results:
E-mails and partial e-mails don't seem to be recognized by the search in a useful way
Expected results:
E-mails and partial e-mails work correctly in the search
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Comment 1•1 year ago
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You can use the advanced search (Ctrl+Shift+F). That does not do stemming.
The advanced search from what I can tell doesn't seem to allow searching globally, but only at most one single account (instead of all accounts).
In any case, it would be nice if the default search handled e-mails and partial e-mails like most users would expect them, especially since Thunderbird is an e-mail client.
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Comment 3•1 year ago
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With nightly build on Mac I just tested a fictitious address crap@crap.me - a) when typing in search field the address is recognized as having been indexted, and b) the message is found.
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Comment 4•1 year ago
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Some addresses work, but some don't, from my tests today. Perhaps the length of the address is part of the problem? @dm.de is fairly short.
Ah, a small update: I see now part of what is happening. If I type @dm.de and I click one of the entries that pops up as "Messages mentioning ...someaddress@dm.de", then it works. However, if I type @dm.de and immediately press enter without clicking anything, it doesn't. The latter is vital to search for senders that end with some suffix. Interestingly enough, typing @mozilla.org and pressing enter works, so it seems to depend on the address whether a suffix search works or not.
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Comment 7•2 months ago
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This is caused by gloda indexing on token sizes of three characters or more. Strings like dm and de do not get indexed.
The new message database panorama may resolve this. In the mean time, there is bug 1134629
Aren't email addresses indexed separately from words? Fascinating. Would panorama solve this?
#1134629 doesn't suggest any fix, merely making the user aware. For not being able to find emails by the actual email address, that seems potentially insufficient.
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