628075 - Search all messages fails to find messages that quick filter can see

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 598605

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[Niklas Hambüchen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.10 Chromium/10.0.645.0 Chrome/10.0.645.0 Safari/534.16
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101208 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.7

I have some mails in my Sent IMAP folder that are easily findable by hand or quick filter (searching for the first characters of the subject, exact case).

However, if I enter the same search term in the "Search all messages" global search input, no messages are found.

This causes a reasonable amount of confusion and loss of time as one has to quick filter _any_ directory to make sure everything has been searched through properly.

Any idea what the reason for this could be?
Hints on how to reproduce? I will try them.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Steps to reproduce currently unknown. Happens only for a few mails, but always reproducible for them.
Actual Results:  
Messages were not found.

Expected Results:  
All messages that quick filter finds should be findable by the global search.

Comment 1

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

One important difference is that global search only searches for full words (and stems, so "cat" would also match "cats"), whereas the quickfilter can do substrings within words (e.g. "ats" would match "cats").

Comment 2

[Niklas Hambüchen]

This might be related on how Thunderbird handles emails with "Re:" at the beginning.

If I search for "Re: My" where the subject of the lost mail is "Re: My cool subject", global search does not find it. If I search for "My", it is found.

This seems to be a bug, as the "Re:" is part of the subject (as written in the email source code) and no user might ever get the idea that messages are not shown when searching for what is exactly written in the subject in the list.

Can anyone confirm this as the reason?

Comment 3

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to mail from comment #2)
> This might be related on how Thunderbird handles emails with "Re:" at the
> beginning.
> If I search for "Re: My" where the subject of the lost mail is "Re: My cool
> subject", global search does not find it. If I search for "My", it is found.

To be torelant with issues around "multiple Re:'s in Subject:", and to make "multiple Re:'s processing" such as "Threading by Subject:" easy, Tb currently removes preceding Re:(single or multiple) from data held as subject strings in MsgDB(.msf file).
It can be seen by next.
(1) Save a mail which has ascii-only "Subject: Re: ..." to .eml file(eml-1.eml).
(2) Copy eml-1.eml to eml-2.eml, edit eml-2.eml by text editor, change Subject: to "Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: ...", and save.
(3) Create a local mail folder(call FolderX). 
(4) Drag&Drop two .eml files to Thread Pane of FolderX.
(5) Folder Properties of FolderX, General, Repair Folder.
(6) View two mails.
(7) Terminate Tb.
(8) View FolderX.msf content by text editor.
By removing Re:('s) from held subject string(perhaps with Re-exists-flag=true), Tb can easily/consistently/correctly generate "Subject: without multiple Re:'s" upon reply, forwart etc.

Predefined "Subject" in Message Filter and Search(Edit/Find/Search Messages, or Search of folder context menu) probably sees this "held subject in .msf".
Gloda's Indexer/Search may use this "held subject in .msf" too, or may use same logic as MsgDB. But Gloda's Indexer may use Subject: header lines(s) in message source directly with his own logic to extract strings in Subject: header.

In contrast to it, "customized Subject header" probably searches Subject: header line(s) in message source. Is it right?

(Off-Topic-A)
If Search(Edit/Find/Search Messages, or Search of folder context menu) by "predefined Subject" can find Re: in Subject:, he perhaps counts Re-exists-flag=true like flag. But I guess he can't find multiple Re:'s in Subject: correctly/as expected, because it looks that Tb doesn't have Re-in-Subject-count like data in .msf.

(Off-Topic-B)
Re: in Subject: is logically considered "not subject text" in RFC, although it's also a text data in Subject: header syntactically. It's something like meta-info of Subject: and "multiple Re:'s in Subject:" is stated as "wrong use of Re:". So, searching for "Re: re: RE: ..." in subject is not correct logically. "Search for Re: of subject" should be "Subject has no Re:/has Re:" like one, if properly implemented as "meta-info".

Comment 4

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to mail from comment #0)
> I have some mails in my Sent IMAP folder that are easily findable by hand or
> quick filter (searching for the first characters of the subject, exact case).
> 
> However, if I enter the same search term in the "Search all messages" global
> search input, no messages are found.

Dup of bug 598605?

Comment 5

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to mail from comment #0)
> However, if I enter the same search term in the "Search all messages" global
> search input, no messages are found.

You are probably looking a phenomenon by bug 598605.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to WADA from comment #5)
> (In reply to mail from comment #0)
> > However, if I enter the same search term in the "Search all messages" global
> > search input, no messages are found.
> 
> You are probably looking a phenomenon by bug 598605.

reporter, do you agree


"Re:" is reported in a different bug

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

duping by default