272042 - 'Search Messages -> Body' also searches inside base64 encoded parts as if this is normal text, resulting in wrong matches and slower search.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 136055

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Niek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 0.9 (20041103)

When using the quick search set to 'Entire Message', or the 'Search Messages -
> Body' search (which is actually confusingly named differently, but that's 
another issue) the search also returns matched messages in which the search 
term appears inside a base64 encoded part of the message, rather than just the 
text in a multi-part message. So, when i was searching for a particular search 
term 'sek7', the search returned 75 messages instead of the 14 returned by 
Outlook Express in the same folder. Further investigation revealed that the 
particular string appears in certain parts of base64 encoded attachments. 
E.g., here's a small part of the message source that shows where the search 
feature found the match for 'sek7': "j2Ax7SQJ0kFRHtsJeQ8HsEK7pvqtjek9u+I"

Of course, this is normally not a big problem when you're searching for words 
in the dictionary (there's only a very small chance that they'd appear as part 
of a base64 encoded part, esp. with longer words). But when you're looking for 
short technical terms without spaces, this is rather inconvenient. Most people 
don't know or care that their attachments are encoded in a certain way, and 
when they're searching for text, they don't want to get back seemingly random 
matches.

So instead, when using the 'Body'/'Entire Message' function on multi-part 
emails, it should only search in specific parts of the message: those parts 
that directly represent text. 

Not only will this solve the problems above, it should also speed up the 
search dramatically when you have many messages with attachments in them, 
because these attachments generally represent a large part of your message 
that is unnecessarily searched (easily 95% or more), and can be skipped.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use the quick search function or "Find -> Search Messages" option to look 
for a piece of text.

Actual Results:  
It returned the wrong matches for the search term. Explained above.

Expected Results:  
Search only text.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Search & filtering are core functionality.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 136055 ***