630842 - Limitations of Tbird search

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Dennis Anello]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C) SearchToolbar/1.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101207 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.7

The search features of Tbird have been improving over time, and I thank you for these improvements.  Below is a list of some noted limitations of Tbird search feature, which I'd love to see further improvements on:

* does not highlight the searched for text in the found emails; add highlighting and display of the highlighted found text in preview window

* why not have top window list found email titles, and bottom window show preview of the selected email from the top window list (like most desktop search programs).  That way it's easier to scroll through a long list of found emails listed by one line subject to find the one you are looking for.  The way your search display is now, it shows 1st found email followed by partial preview then 2nd etc...  So if there are lots of found emails, you have to scroll through many screens, and since it does not highlight the found text in each found email, you have to open each one -- one by one to search for the found text. 

* have preview window scrollable to be able to view all of the email (without having to double click on each email in the found list in order to search for the search text (having to do this double click to open email, browse for search text; not found then close email and on to next email... This can be quite tedious and time consuming if the list of found emails is long).  This is the way Copernica desktop search displays found emails, and I find it much better.

Thanks for listening, and for such a great open source email client program.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Dennis, thank you for this list. Could you file any that do not already exist [1] as separate bugs please, so each issue can be tracked?  Feel free to modify THIS bug to a single issue and we can reopen it.
(each bug should track only one issue)

[1] search enhancement bugs https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?type1-0-0=substring&field0-0-0=short_desc&bug_severity=enhancement&type0-0-1=substring&field0-0-1=keywords&type1-0-1=allwordssubstr&resolution=---&classification=Client%20Software&classification=Components&chfieldto=Now&chfield=[Bug%20creation]&query_format=advanced&chfieldfrom=24m&type0-0-0=anywordssubstr&component=Search&field1-0-0=short_desc&product=MailNews%20Core&product=Thunderbird&field1-0-1=short_desc