456537 - search messages - Body contains gives false results

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 37031

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Jan Lucenius]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.16

Search messages, body contains lists messages which don't contain to search phrase.  I at least  This seems to be independent of the word and the platform (tried with Finnish version for Windows XP and English for (Suse) Linux.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. From menu Edit -> Find -> Search Messages
2. choose Body, contains and write some word to search.
3. you get a long list of messages, all of which do not contain the word that you search for.
Actual Results:  
Ususally a long list of messages of which only a few may be  the actual ones

Expected Results:  
only the messages that contain the search phrase

Comment 1

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Are the false positives base64-encoded?

Comment 2

[jay thyen]

This has been a problem with every version of Thunderbird I've ever installed in the last 4 years (I'm currently using version 2.0.0.17 (20080914)). It's the only complaint I've had with the software.

The problem is easy to reproduce. Here's what I've noticed: falsely retrieved messages contain the text the user is searching for in the message source! It should only be retrieving data from within the actual email message.

To reproduce:
1. Do a search on the 'body' of the messages using some intentionally obscure text you know should only results in relatively few results.
2. Find one of the many messages that is falsely retrieved by your query (search body of message for that text to verify).
3. In that message, go to View>>Message Source, to open up the 'message source' window.
4. Do a Find on the text.

There's the culprit.

Comment 3

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Do you have a copy of such a message?

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESO INCO due to lack of answer to last question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.

Comment 5

[jay thyen]

Yes. Please give me some instructions on how to send an example.

Comment 6

[jay thyen]

Joshua,
I just forwarded an email to your Gmail account ([Fwd: Lunch?]). Send it to Thunderbird and search for dGVzdA== in the body. I was able to get Thunderbird version 2.0.0.18 (20081105) running on Windows XP to find it. There isn't even text in the body of the email I'm sending. There's a small attachment (named test_attachment) that was created in SciTE for this test; it contains only four characters: I simply typed the word "Test" and saved it.

This worked back and forth between Gmail and my office's email at least 3 times and the message source consistently contained the text dGVzdA== without fail and my search of the Inbox finds it each time.

Of course this is seriously contrived scenario (why would I ever search for that) but daily when I search for other seemingly unique words, this same thing happens. The bigger the email attachment, the higher the likelihood I'll hit the correct sequence (in the message source) making a word I would be searching for--in doing so--triggering a false positive.
Jason Thyen

Comment 7

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

By inspection of email source, this is the same as bug 37031, which was fixed for the most common cases on the trunk builds of Thunderbird.