Thunderbird is far from brilliant, it’s adequate, which is high praise in a sea of absolute vile crap, but it still doesn’t make it brilliant. Its search (a pretty fundamental feature of an email client at least to me) is absolutely god-awful if not completely broken, at least at the scale of mailboxes I have, and this doesn’t seem like an uncommon problem that is limited to just me. I am forced to resort to grep or addons in order to do a proper search of any of my folders with any level of confidence that I am not missing those lovely disappearing messages, since random messages just aren’t indexed in Thunderbird’s search repeatably, and consistently over about a dozen years of using it, only about 50% of my messages get indexed to become searchable despite any amount of folder reorganization and rebuilding of indexes and deleting databases and other frustrating troubleshooting steps it never works properly.
I’ve lately been considering giving up on it entirely and moving to a TUI client for email. I might try Betterbird first to see if it’s actually any better.
I’m not sure. Sometimes things don’t work but generally it’s fine but gets really laggy when I tell it to search email bodies as well, which luckily I don’t need to do much. Gmail had a lot more trouble when I used that.
I am talking about Thunderbird on my laptop, not phone btw.
Thunderbird is far from brilliant, it’s adequate, which is high praise in a sea of absolute vile crap, but it still doesn’t make it brilliant. Its search (a pretty fundamental feature of an email client at least to me) is absolutely god-awful if not completely broken, at least at the scale of mailboxes I have, and this doesn’t seem like an uncommon problem that is limited to just me. I am forced to resort to grep or addons in order to do a proper search of any of my folders with any level of confidence that I am not missing those lovely disappearing messages, since random messages just aren’t indexed in Thunderbird’s search repeatably, and consistently over about a dozen years of using it, only about 50% of my messages get indexed to become searchable despite any amount of folder reorganization and rebuilding of indexes and deleting databases and other frustrating troubleshooting steps it never works properly.
I’ve lately been considering giving up on it entirely and moving to a TUI client for email. I might try Betterbird first to see if it’s actually any better.
Hm so far Thunderbird has been better for searching than anything else that ive tried which honestly isn’t saying much.
You can make Thunderbird search work!? Tell me your secretes because Thunderbird can never find anything for me other than all the wrong things.
I’m not sure. Sometimes things don’t work but generally it’s fine but gets really laggy when I tell it to search email bodies as well, which luckily I don’t need to do much. Gmail had a lot more trouble when I used that.
I am talking about Thunderbird on my laptop, not phone btw.
mu4e
I started using notmuch for indexing a long time ago. Works for me. I only use thunderbird 2-3 times a year though, otherwise it’s always mutt.
Do you check the box to perform searches on the server? Searching on the server never works for me. As in it takes eleventy three hours.
I’m with you on the search, it’s terrible on all platforms.
I found setup quite easy though.