296962 - Add search criterion "anything contains" -- make default for Advanced

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 421335

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

[rfe] default advanced search to "anything contains"

by default, the advanced message search dialog currently comes up with "subject
contains ...".

what if we had a new criteria "anything" (or "something") so that the default
would be "anything contains ...."

"anything" would expand to an OR search of all the text criteria (subject, body,
sender, etc) that are valid for the current search scope.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

can't say I like the idea of this being a default: a) you'll get nusiance bugs
about search being slow from people too lazy to change it to something
intelligent, b) subject is what I use probably more than anything else

if anything, default to --, i.e. nothing  
but my pref is don't change it - keep it subject

Comment 2

[Jeff Spirko]

The "anything" criterion requested here is the same as the "full message source" criterion in Bug 235908 or the revamped "Entire Message" in Bug 271222.

I'd love to have the option, but making it the default may be overkill.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

My surprise is that there's no convenient way to get the exact behaviour of quick filter bar in advanced search. It can be mimicked to some extent, but it's complicated and it's not possible to get the exact same result set.

In quick filter bar, I can just use search terms "Peter holiday Australia" and it'll default to finding messages where:
    (Subject OR Sender OR Recipients contains "Peter")
AND (Subject OR Sender OR Recipients contains "holiday")
AND (Subject OR Sender OR Recipients contains "Australia")

That's very convenient, as it works with a little but of fuzziness but perfectly catching these:
e.g. Message by Peter with Subject "My holiday in Australia"
e.g. Message with subject "Peter's holiday in Australia"
So it actually finds each and every message involving these aspects.

Iow the typical case of:
Sender OR Recipient contains "Peter"
AND subject contains "Holiday"
AND subject contains "Australia"

But also:
    Subject contains "Peter"
AND subject contains "Holiday"
AND subject contains "Australia"

There are several reasons why we fail on this:
- we don't support nested AND/OR conditions (existing bug on record)
- lacking that, there's also no "Subject OR Sender OR Recipients" criterion (but you can mimic that to some extent)
- we don't support "contains any of" and "contains all of" with more than one word as search terms

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

If this is ever done, I expect it will be done via bug 421335