224183 - Attachment email message headers not searchable

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Otto J. Mäkelä]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.9 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030314
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.9 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030314

For email messages which have other email messages as attachments (eg. main
message is multipart/mixed with a message/rfc822 attachment) "search messages"
can never match the attached email message headers -- they do not seem to be a
part of the main message headers nor the message body. Surprisingly enough, the
attached email message body can be searched using the regular body search.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. View message with a message/rfc822 attachment source with View/Message
source... (ctrl+u)
2. Open Tools/Search Messages... (ctrl+shift+f)
3. Try to search for something you can see in the viewed message attachment
headers, searching either using specific header names or "body"

Actual Results:  
Nothing was found.

Expected Results:  
The attachment email message headers should be searchable as either a named
header or as a part of the message body.

This may or may not be related to bug #140532, which is about somewhat similar
confusion in displaying attached email headers:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=140532

Identical problem seen with Mozilla 1.5.1 and Thunderbird 0.3, so this hasn't
been recently fixed.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

For comparison, see bug 98141.  If you search the *body* of the message for the 
desired header, is it not located?  If that bug is still valid, it ought to.

That is not to say this bug is invalid, I think a well-designed Search interface 
should allow you to specify whether (textual) attachments should be searched 
(but, probably, never binaries, as seen with 98141), whether to search only 
emails or any readable text, whether to search specifically on headers of 
attached messages or the attached messages' bodies as well, and so on.

Comment 2

[Otto J. Mäkelä]

bug #98141 seems to be about the opposite situation, finding some things you are
not expecting in attached message body parts. My problem is that the attached
message headers never get searched, since the program logic does not consider
them to be a part of either the body or the headers. The search logic could
certainly be revised in a major way, but I would be happy with an initial patch
which would simply enable one to search all attachment contents (both header and
body, in the case of attached emails) as if they were a part of the message body.

Comment 3

[Aleksey Nogin]

Yes, I see this too. BuildID 2004060722 on Fedora Core 2.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 212442 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***