600513 - When using IMAP server, "Search message body" behavior needs to be revisited

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 543416

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[Jeff Bloomfield]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10
Build Identifier: 3.1.2

Or alternatively, when using an IMAP server, the ability to search

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jeff Bloomfield]

I believe that searching message body (IMAP) should always appear in the list box whether or not search-on-server is checked.  To a mail guru I suppose the current behavior is obvious, but to an ordinary user it is not.  That is, the knowledge that search-on-server needs to be checked for "message body" to appear on the search list box is implicit not explicit knowledge.

I think a reasonable behavior, assuming search-on-server is unchecked, would simply to show an "ok/cancel" box with the message something like, "This option
will requiring searching on your mail server and will take more time than a simple mail message header search.  Proceed?"  Or simply shut-up and do the body search on the server.

I had to search on google to learn of this behavior.  The current behavior makes sense from an engineer's point of view but not from the point of view of an ordinary user, especially one used to the previous version.