273395 - Saved search using custom attributes returns more results than expected

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 209488

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[James Spinks]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: version 1.0RC1 (20041201)

Using Saved Search folders to categorise my mailing lists.  Mostly these lists
come from Sneakemail one time email addresses.  Theoretically this should then
be a case of setting a simple search for the following:

X-Sneakemail-Label contains Cygwin

However, this also returns emails that do not match the search criteria.  It
returns many emails from both my Freshmeat and TinyFugue mailing lists.  However
the one thing all these extra messages have in common is that the word 'cygwin'
appears somewhere in the subject line for that email.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Set a saved search that filters on a custom header using a word that also
appears in the subject line of other emails.
2.  Open the virtual folder
3.  Check for emails returned that weren't expected.

Actual Results:  
Lots of extra emails appear

Expected Results:  
Only emails with the correct header should appear

This also occured under the 0.9 build when Saved Search folders were first
introduced.

Comment 1

[James Spinks]

In fact, it seems to not just be if the trigger word appears in the subject
line.  I have created a new Saved Search just now and it included many messages
that did not match the saved search criteria.  However the trigger word did
appear in a number of other headers (specifically: Return-Path, a number of
Received lines, the From and To as well as the Message-Id line).  The Saved
Search in this instance was:

X-Sneakemail-Label contains Freshmeat

So does it seems as if Saved Searches using custom headers in fact search
against all of the mail's headers instead?

I may do some more tests later using different Saved Searches time permitting.

Comment 2

[James Spinks]

Confirmed.  Saved Searches against default headers such as To, CC and Sender do
not return false positives.  Saved Searches using any custom header (such as
X-Sneakemail-Label or MailingList) will return false positives if the trigger
string appears in any other of the email's headers.  It doesn't seem to matter
if the email in question even contains one of the custom headers or not it can
still be included as a false positive.

Comment 3

[James Spinks]

And still occurs with the latest release of Thunderbird -- version 1.0 (20041206)

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 209488 ***