Open Bug 271249 Opened 21 years ago Updated 1 year ago

Unable to select all (sub-)folders for "saved search"

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Search
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

People

(Reporter: mozilla.org, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: dupetome)

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 Now I've tried the Saved Searches facility, and I'm honestly surprized it was released. This is a really useful feature, like the "Large mail" and "For Follow Up" defaults in Outlook 2003, and needs a usability touch. The core of the problem: I have _lots_ of IMAP folders, and need to view marked messages quickly. I could do it with saved searches, but: - I have to select each folder to be searched manually - This has to be repeated for all searches on all accounts, and for each change of folder structure Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. File -> New -> Saved Search... 2. Attempt a quick setup of this functionality Actual Results: It takes forever and is not flexible (cannot set something like "search all subfolders, even after structural changes"). Expected Results: 1. Provide an interface with a prefilled "Name" field OR an icon for "saved search" folders to distinguish them from other folderes. 2. In the "Choose..." dialog, provide useful functionality like CTRL-A, SHIFT-select, and buttons to select all, none, or descendants. 3. A lot of options for specifying whether rules should work even if a folder is moved or added in the tree OR reasonable defaults for these options
Product: Browser → Seamonkey
Assignee: sspitzer → mail
This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01". This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code. While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug (given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more reproduction information if you have it. If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved. Thank you for your help in this matter. The latest beta releases can be obtained from: Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/ Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html Seamonkey: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/
This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 20 years ago
Resolution: --- → EXPIRED
Status: RESOLVED → UNCONFIRMED
OS: Windows XP → All
Hardware: PC → All
Resolution: EXPIRED → ---
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
QA Contact: search
Product: Mozilla Application Suite → Core
*** Bug 272776 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The mentioned problem a real usability issue, preventing users to effectively organize and track messages.
David, Does a bug need to be filed for this for TB? Or is this strictly a backend item?
Product: Core → MailNews Core
Whiteboard: dupeme
there are multiple aspects to this bug - some are front end issues; how to select a lot of folders and include them in a search (though this works fine right now - selecting a bunch of folders in the picker and pressing space will select them); more interesting is how to include new sub-folders in a saved search scope, what should the ui be to indicate that new sub-folders should be included in the scope (front end issue), and how to implement this in the backend. My thought about the latter is to extend scopes to support patterns, and include all folders that match the pattern when creating the saved searches on startup. For example, you could have a scope like "mailbox://nobody@local folders/Inbox/*, and that would match all sub-folders of the inbox. The backend wouldn't be too hard to implement for that. It would be nice to extend that to things like matching all Inboxes, etc. When a new folder is created, the virtual folder listener in the account manager could iterate over the saved searches and see if the new folder matches the pattern of any saved search.
Don't forget a related problem if you touch the storage of virtual folders. If you delete a folder, then currently that folder is not deleted from the definition of the virtual folder. That should also be fixed. Using folder listeners could fix that problem as well as the problem you are addressing in comment 7, but if you simply add some new "*" scheme then you still need to handle deleted folders in some other manner.
> Using folder listeners could fix that problem as well as the problem you are addressing in > comment 7, but if you simply add some new "*" scheme then you still need to > handle deleted folders in some other manner. No, the * scheme would still require the same kind of folder listener as handling deleted folders because we still need to add VirtualFolderChangeListeners for every matching folder, and we would need to add a new one when a new folder was created. In other words, I believe the mechanism we would have to use for * would be the same mechanism we could use for handling deleted folders.
Just a workaround... Tired of losing too much time adding every single new folder, I've developed an extension, named SavedSearchThemAll. Check it out: http://micz.it/thunderdbird-extension-savedsearchthemall/ (please, read the warnings on the page)
Whiteboard: dupeme → dupetome
Hope this can be solved! Maybe solve it in stages? 1. Add a Select All button to the Edit Saved Search Properties, Choose, Select Folders dialog. 2. Add automatic subfolder selection like a backup utility does, so when you check a parent folder, subfolders are automatically checked. 3. In both Folder Properties and New Subfolder dialogs, add ~ "Include this folder in Saved Search" options, with a Saved Search dialog listing the Saved Searches, with checkboxes to choose which Saved Searches will access a particular folder. LOVE! Thunderbird. DO THIS THING! It will ease much pain and raise the bar for T'bird in the enterprise, where email archives are a must.
Since this is a 9 year old bug and therefore gone into that zone where it will never get fixed - (just anyone who reports it again will be deleted as a duplicate). Could a subset be solved, for example just Search-All . I've got a few hundred folders, setting up a search for example for a tag in any of them is excruciatingly painfull requiring 15 mins or so of just clicking the boxes for each and every folder.
Removing myslef on all the bugs I'm cced on. Please NI me if you need something on MailNews Core bugs from me.
Still a problem. I have 589 folders. Earth to mozzies? See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479657 (relates specifically to properties, not the create search window), please don't just delete them, please solve it!
Product: MailNews Core → Thunderbird
See Also: → 378833
Assignee: mail → nobody
Severity: normal → S3

This is still an issue in v127.
A search folder should be able to implement everything that a regular ctrl-shift-f search implements, and that is not currently the case. A saved search does not have the "Search subfolders" option, so any new subfolders will not be searched (This is especially problematic when searching the Archive folder since the default Thunderbird archive method creates a new archive folder each year - which will not be searched unless the search folders are all updated each year).

(In reply to Meichthys from comment #21)

This is still an issue in v127.
A search folder should be able to implement everything that a regular ctrl-shift-f search implements, and that is not currently the case. A saved search does not have the "Search subfolders" option, so any new subfolders will not be searched (This is especially problematic when searching the Archive folder since the default Thunderbird archive method creates a new archive folder each year - which will not be searched unless the search folders are all updated each year).

I was wrong about new search folders not being added to the search folder settings. It does appear that new folders will be added (if the parent folder is selected in the saved search properties).

@Meichthys
A very specific subset works - i.e. if you select a folder to search and THEN create a folder inside it then it searches it.
It doesn't pick up sub-folders of sub-folders - such as created by the Archive functionality
Nor does it search the existing sub-folders, which need manually selecting (including - if you use monthly archives - every month of every year).

You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.