528229 - Want pref to narrow down quick search box to match sender only or all addresses

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dave]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091017 SeaMonkey/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091017 SeaMonkey/2.0

The quick search was very useful in Seamonkey 1.x. It would search for subject or sender in the inbox; subject or recipient in the sent folder. Now, in Seamonkey 2.0, it searches for subject or ANY address. This is undesirable, as it produces far too many "hits".

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. start mail-news client
2. select inbox
3. enter desired sender name/address
Actual Results:  
shows messages where desired sender was a recipient

Expected Results:  
show messages where desired sender was the sender

This worked in Mozilla 1.x. I searched for this bug, and for a way to change a preference, but could find nothing. I would be happy with a config preference to change this, but it should ultimately be fixed, or easily changed. I used to use the quick search extensively, but it is useless now.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

That change was done on purpose in bug 518846, so changing it back would likely resolve as WONTFIX or INVALID due to a design decision. This could be confirmed though as enhancement request for introducing a preference or extending to a quick-search like functionality that Thunderbird provides, if not yet pending.

Comment 2

[Dave]

Thank you for the quick reply. Can I change this to an enhancement request? I would very much like to have the option of the SM1.x behavior. A new preference seems like a reasonable solution.

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

Porting the Thunderbird quick search is pending already as bug 399722, without any action yet though, thus we could resolve this as a duplicate of that other bug. You can change title and severity of your report yourself to retarget it. Personally I'd prefer the full solution with various options for the quick search, but a simple hidden pref with fewer options may be easier to implement.

Comment 4

[Dave]

Thanks for the information. I would greatly appreciate a quick fix, as the quick search is useless to me now. A simple pref to change it back to the 1.x behavior would be great. I would be happy to test a nightly build.. :)

Comment 5

[rsx11m]

Confirming as valid RFE but making it dependent to bug 399722 as this would be obsolete if the full implementation becomes available.

Comment 6

[Dave]

I have read and digested the original RFE 518846. With all respect to Mr. Velkov and those who made the change, I don't think the current behavior is correct. In my opinion, it is meaningless to search for cc or bcc in the inbox. In the sent, it would be useful, but not for inbox.

Comment 7

[rapuz]

Dear all, I agree with Dave, the current behavior of the quick search box is less useful than the previous one. Porting the "old" Thunderbird quick search would be great, but also an option to choose the old behavior would be greatly appreciated.
BTW, thanks for your invaluable works, guys!

Regards,
Riccardo.

Comment 9

[shubhyant.chaturvedi]

This is bug is currently not assigned to anybody. Given the fact that multiple users have complained about this issue and have filed duplicate and similar bugs, I was wondering if we could escalate the priority on this bug and have the feature (or a work-around) given to users. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This change is causing a lot of problems for us.

Thanks.

-Shubhyant

Comment 10

[Philip Chee]

SeaMonkey is a fully community driven project. We don't have any paid developers or in fact paid anything. Escalating the priority won't help unless someone volunteers their time to write some code to fix this bug.

Comment 11

[shubhyant.chaturvedi]

I missed taking note of that. Sorry. 

I was wondering if someone would be able to tell me in which version release this "enhancement" [of changing the Search field] was released. I could not decipher that from the bug which captured the release: 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=518846

For the time-being, I can download an older release and work with that. I might lose some other features incorporated in the later releases but for me this enhancement is killing my productivity.

Thanks,
-Shubhyant

Comment 12

[shubhyant.chaturvedi]

Just wondering if anyone would be able to respond to my query on Comment#11.
I would like to work with an older release of Seamonkey to get around this issue. However, I am unable to figure out which release should I be switching back to...

Thanks,
-Shubhyant

Comment 13

[rsx11m]

This has been in the tree since the SM 2.0 release, as far as I can tell from the time stamps for bug 518846. Thus, you'd have to go way back to a 2.0 beta version.

Comment 14

[bsharp321-mozilla]

Given that many users are complaining about this won't it be possible to simply revert changes for Bug 518846 ? Quick Search is one of the most useful features of Seamonkey, this "bug fix" made it all but useless.