447977 - Missing feature: "scope" (thread, subthread, etc) to search folders

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Romano Giannetti]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061015 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.14 (20080505)

The only feature of evolution that I really miss in TB is the possibility to choose the "scope" of the search on the search folders. For example, I used to have a search folder that selected all the threads where an author intervened on, for example, the folder where I receive linux-kernel mailing list.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Kent James (:rkent)]

I don't really understand what you mean here by "scope" as that ia a vague term, and I am not familiar with Evolution. To me, "scope" is that same as folders - whcih you can choose in TB searches. So could you be a little more clear precisely what you are looking for?

Comment 2

[Romano Giannetti]

Yes, sorry to be that terse.

The scenario is this: I want to read all discussion on linux-kernel mailing list where I am involved. I have a filter rule that put all the messages of the list in the folder "VGER".

Now, in evolution, I can create a search folder with my email as the search condition, the VGER folder as the source, and then select "include all thread" (or all replies, or all subthread starting from the message, or all related --- with a reference in message-id). In the search folder there will be not only my messages, but all the messages of the threads in which I happen to write. 

In evolution, near the search box, there is a drop-down that is thread... and you can choose "just this message --- the subthread --- the thread --- all replies --- all related". I will add a snapshot of the window configuration of a search folder in evolution.

Comment 3

[Romano Giannetti]

Attachment: Search folder configuration in evolution mail

Comment 5

[Matěj Cepl]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I don't really understand what you mean here by "scope" as that ia a vague
> term, and I am not familiar with Evolution. To me, "scope" is that same as
> folders - whcih you can choose in TB searches. So could you be a little more
> clear precisely what you are looking for?

Or see a scenario in my bug 522733.

Comment 6

[Kent James (:rkent)]

Now that I understand this, I thought of whether it could be implemented as a custom search term in an extension, which would be the first approach to consider. A custom search term could not make this a general scope option, but I could probably take specific search terms (such as Subject or All Addresses) and add a special version that would test all messages in a thread for the term. It would scale badly though, as if there were N messages in the thread, there would be N^2 checks required in the current design.

I'll experiment with this in my FiltaQuilla extension. But in the long run, this might be a decent gloda application.

Comment 7

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Yeah, a gloda-based solution would probably be one of the cleaner solutions to the use-case.  While my solution to the problem would probably not involve 'search folders' as such, I understand that the Eudora folks have adapted their search window to also have a gloda-backed mode... one could probably build on that to add an additional post-processing step to do the conversation fetches (and whatever filtering is required for sub-thread constraints...)