664679 - can no longer search bodies of messages

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[Sara Uckelman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110428 Fedora/3.6.17-1.fc14 Firefox/3.6.17
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110428 Fedora/3.1.10-1.fc14 Thunderbird/3.1.10

In previous version of TB, under Edit -> Find -> Search Messages, the dropdown menu (normally set to "subject") used to have an option of "body", to allow one to search over the bodies of messages in a folder.  This option has disappeared with recent versions of TB, which is extremely frustrating.  I would post a screenshot of what I do see, except that I cannot use prtscr when the drop down menu is open (another bug?).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Edit -> Find -> Search messages
2. Select drop down menu
3.

Actual Results:  
 Fail to find "body".

Expected Results:  
Find option "body" so that I can search the body of email messages.

Comment 1

[Sara Uckelman]

Attachment: drop-down menu which should have option for "body" but no longer does.

I found out how to make a screenshot of the dropdown menu via gimp.  Here's the dropdown where "body" used to be an option but no longer is.

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

You should see it if you check "Run search on server" and then look into the options provided in the menu (bug 543416 if this solves it).

Comment 3

[Sara Uckelman]

This worked, but does this mean that the option is only available if I'm connected to the internet?  That didn't use to be the case -- I used to be able to search local copies.  It would be very nice to have that functionality again.

Comment 4

[rsx11m]

You likely have "Keep messages for this account on this computer" unchecked in Edit > Account Settings > (account) > Synchronization & Storage, in which case there are no local copies, but everything is kept on the remote IMAP server.
It may also depend on Gloda being activated, I'm not sure about that.

Comment 5

[Sara Uckelman]

I went and looked; I do have that setting checked (I can and have regularly in the past been able to read/move emails locally when I'm offline).

I don't have a clue what Gloda is.

Comment 6

[rsx11m]

According to bug 543416 comment #11 disabling search for the message body should only be effective if offline synchronization is switched off for that folder. There is a complementary per-folder setting though which might have been switched; right-click on the affected Inbox and select Properties, then make sure that the box in the "Synchronization" tab is checked for that folder.

Gloda is the new "Global Search" function which was introduced with TB 3.0, searching across accounts and using an indexed database for that purpose. The traditional searches should not depend on the indexer being activated, but you can double-check it in Edit > Preferences > Advanced > General, "Enable Global Search and Indexer" should be checked.

Comment 7

[Sara Uckelman]

Ahah!  For that folder, the "select this folder for offline use" box was NOT checked.  Thank you very much for your help -- I never would've been able to figure this out myself, and I certainly didn't figure it out by looking in TB's help online earlier today.  It's always frustrating when something that used to work just fine suddenly disappears and there's no way to find out how to get it to work again.

I now have the global search option checked, too.

Comment 8

[rsx11m]

You are welcome. Though you've seen the same effect as described in bug 543416 folder synchronization wasn't disabled intentionally, thus it's not a dupe.

I'm resolving this WFM since the issue appears to be corrected and working now, please feel free to reopen the bug if you still see any problems.

Comment 9

[rsx11m]

(or, Ludo/Wayne: Do you want to keep this open to investigate what flipped the folder setting? It may be hard to figure out such a random event by forensics though, unless it's somehow reproducible and can be triggered again...)

Comment 10

[Sara Uckelman]

On the basis of the number of emails that downloaded once I checked the box, the setting got flipped sometime in November of last year (only the most recent 340 downloaded; the previous 700 were already there).  Was there an upgrade of either thunderbird or of fedora around that time?  (I update programmes automatically, and my husband does the upgrade to the newest version of fedora about a week or so after it comes out, so I don't ever know/remember when that happens).

Comment 11

[rsx11m]

This may have been a major update from 3.0.10 to 3.1.6 around that time, but it shouldn't have changed anything in the default offline-synchronization settings. Those were enabled by default from 2.0 to 3.0 already, thus I wouldn't expect any migration code possibly gone wrong.

Comment 12

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #9)
> (or, Ludo/Wayne: Do you want to keep this open to investigate what flipped
> the folder setting? It may be hard to figure out such a random event by

I would if this issue had been reported a bit more widely.