229142 - Allow search of complete message (ALL headers, as well as body)

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[JoSH Lehan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

In the "Search Messages" window of the email client (Mozilla Mail or
Thunderbird), one can choose a particular header to be searched on.  One can
also define additional headers to add to the list.  However, there is no option
to search in ALL headers!  It would be nice to have an additional option, "All
Headers", that would search all headers (excluding only the message body).

There is an option "Body" in the list, and it searches the entire body, but NOT
the headers.  It would also be nice to have the option "Entire Message", that
searches the entire message.

This would be very convenient for trying to find somebody's email address (which
might have appeared in the To/Reply-To/From/etc. headers or as a signature in
the body text).  It would also save the trouble of having to manually add
commonly used headers such as Reply-To.

This would also help with bug 212442.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open the "Search Messages" dialog.
2. Pull down the "Subject" drop list.
3. Be disappointed that there is no "All Headers" or "Entire Message" search
options.

Actual Results:  
See above.

Expected Results:  
See above.

There is a workaround:

Exit Mozilla (to ensure the mail state gets correctly flushed to disk), then
manually grep through Mozilla's profile directory that contains the email
folders.  Since Mozilla stores email in standard mbox format, a simple text
search will be able to find the entire contents of email messages (including all
headers and body).

It would be nice to have this functionality in the UI.

Comment 1

[Kelson]

This would also be nice as a workaround for issues like bug 124641, which
prevents finding text outside the first line of a folded multi-line header.  (As
it is, I have no way to search for messages that trip a particular SpamAssassin
rule without resorting to grep, since X-Spam-Status usually takes up two or
three lines.)

Comment 2

[Ben Burdette]

There is a similar problem on the search screen with the "Search for messages
in:" dropdown.  You are allowed to search an individual email account or the
local folders, but not all the folders and accounts at once.  It would be nice
to have an additional option of "All", which would search everything in the
email archives.  

Comment 3

[Ben Burdette]

*** Bug 265443 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[JoSH Lehan]

*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***

Comment 5

[Karsten Düsterloh]

*** Bug 233484 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 353319 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 235908 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Mattias Jiderhamn]

Attachment: Eudora screenshot

This is one of the things I missed when switching from Eudora.

A common scenario for me is, I want to find all messages sent to or from a particular customer. I then use Eudora to search all Headers for the customers email (or simply hostname). I could also chose to search Anywhere (which is the default, by the way) to include find messages between colleagues commenting mails from that customer.

Sure, this can be done in Thunderbird by adding more search conditions, but it is just SO MUCH EASIER in Eudora.

Screenshot from Eudoras dropdown of search scopes/attributes attached. Apart from the Anywhere and Headers, you may want to note Attachment Name(s) and Label (tags in TB 2).

Comment 9

[Mark Arnold]

I am looking for this functionality as well.

Thanks...

Comment 11

[Alakdae]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271222

The patch in the bug above also implements this functionality.

Comment 12

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't think so, this bug is about ALL headers (all those as viewed also from view source).

Comment 13

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to comment #12)
> I don't think so, this bug is about ALL headers (all those as viewed also from
> view source).

That's right, my patch for bug 271222 searches only "All Addresses" + "Body", which is slightly less than "All Headers" + "Body" (as requested by this bug).