294045 - Search Messages is hard to find

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 466424

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[bugzilla]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.0.2 (20050317)

In Mozilla Suite, the Search Messages feature was easily accessible: click on
Tools, then Search Messages.  In Thunderbird it's been buried under Edit: click
Edit, click Find, click Search Messages.

Searching really is a tool in Thunderbird, not an editing function.  In a word
processor, having Find and Replace together under Edit makes sense, because
Finding is a tool to assist in Replacement, which is an editing function.  In
Thunderbird that paradigm doesn't apply, and I move that Search Messages be
moved back to the Tools menu.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Aaron Lawrence]

Actually a button, or better, an always visible search field (ala gmail etc)
would make more sense these days.
Of course there is already the sender/subject search, so that would be confusing. 

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Searching really is a tool in Thunderbird, not an editing function.  In a word
> processor, having Find and Replace together under Edit makes sense, because
> Finding is a tool to assist in Replacement, which is an editing function.  In
> Thunderbird that paradigm doesn't apply, and I move that Search Messages be
> moved back to the Tools menu.

I agree with this.

Note that Search Messages is also on the context menu when you right-click an 
account or folder.