453159 - Request "Show items that contain" functionality on IMAP subscribe dialog

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 281219

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Mike M]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.16 (20080708)

I would like to use the search field (Show items that contain) on the
IMAP Subscribe dialog, but it is greyed out, disabled. I presume that it
is the same dialog that comes up for news subscribe and the search box
functions there. It appears that it is disabled for the imap subscription.

I archive all emails I send and receive. Have been doing so since the
early 90s when the thought occurred to me. I archive
emails in standard mbox format with procmail by sender email address in
the case of emails to me, and recipient email address for emails I send
to others. So I can always look at the mbox file "[e-mail]" to
see any/all correspondence between joe and I, for example.

I further archive by year so my $HOME/Mail directory looks like this:

$ cd $HOME
$ find Mail | sort
Mail/
Mail/[e-mail]
Mail/[e-mail]
Mail/[e-mail]
[snip]
Mail/[e-mail]
[snip]
Mail/old/1992/[e-mail]
[snip]
Mail/old/1995/[e-mail]
[snip]
Mail/old/2007/[e-mail]
Mail/old/2007/[e-mail]
[snip]

I now have a good sized email archive ~49k files, ~10gb. So one may
readily see that it would be very nice to be able to search for the
names of email archives, rather than having to wait for the 49k files
to be read and the list populated by Thunderbird's IMAP Subscribe dialog.

So first, am I the only one in the world archiving email like this?
Maybe there aren't many of us but surely there are a few. It can be
very handy at times to refer back to personal emails, business,
receipts for purchases, etc., etc.

I never subscribe to all folders at the same time. Rather I only subscribe to a handful at any given time. I add subscriptions as needed.

Typically I go through a cycle where I slowly add subscriptions
for a period of months. Then when my subscription list becomes too long
(purely practical matter of dealing with the list/tree control as it gets long) I go in and spend an arduous 10 or 15 minutes unsubscribing, trimming down my list.

Another needed function is to quickly and easily display only subscribed folders. It's quite arduous to page through 49k folders to find the ones that are checked. I'll put this in a separate request.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. IMAP config, Subscribe
2.
3.