573312 - Search body searches attachments (binary attachment, base64 encoded usually)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 37031

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[S. Kerman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.23 (20090812)

When Search function is used to search for text in the body of a message it searches for the text in all binary attachments too, such as JPGs, instead of skipping over them.  As a result the search function takes incredibly long and produces a list of messages many many of which don't actually contain the text string but instead contain MIME encoded character strings that happen to mimic the string being searched for.  When these bogus messages are opened the string cannot be found in them except by using VIEW SOURCE, in which case the string will be found in the MIME encoded attachment.

This problem has existed since very early versions.  I suspected for a long time this was going on but it seemed so incredibly stupid that I could not believe it was actually happening.  I finally got fed up with it and went through the exercise of proving to myself that the programmer who implemented this function was really so amazingly lame!!!!  Truly amazing.  I junior high school kid would know better.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. No step by step instruction is necessary.  See above.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
See above.

Expected Results:  
See above.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

a. please be civil
b. your summary is not descriptive of the problem
c. i'm pretty sure such a bug report already exists
d. (I would suspect but haven't tested) an imperfect workaround is set condition for message does not contain attachments

Comment 3

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to S. Kerman from comment #0)
> it searches for the text in all binary attachments too, such as JPGs,
> instead of skipping over them.

Duping to Bug 37031 is beter than bug 379988 whose bug summary is "search body should not match words in MIME headers", even though "search attachment part" is common issue.
> Bug 37031 searching message body yields false positives because base64 encoded binary attachments are treated as plaintext