Comments on: Speeding up Thunderbird Search with IMAP

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:53:16 +0000

Something to note in the newer Thunderbirds, the search sometimes stays local. Spent ages trying to figure out when the dovecot indexes weren’t being built until I stuck on imap debug and watched the search complete with no traffic to the server.

By: Yeroc

Yeroc — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:16:57 +0000

Check out the GMailUI (http://sites.google.com/site/kmixter/gmailui) plugin. I think it does what you’re looking for in terms of searching. I use it mostly for the keyboard shortcuts but it adds nice searching capabilities as well.

By: Ralph Dosser

Ralph Dosser — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:14:47 +0000

Nice, thanks!

By: moore

moore — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:15:17 +0000

In the past I’ve had issues with TB locking up when I had too many messages in my inbox. So I archived by date (6 or so months in each folder). I thought it was thunderbird, but given my research, it may have been my imap server.

I agree that not being able to search all folders is a pain.

One way to search across multiple folders in Thunderbird is to use a saved search: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Saved_Search#Searching_across_multiple_accounts and just edit the properties as needed. The first time you search across all the folders, it takes a long time (downloading all those messages), but the second time was relatively quick.

The other is to use this TB plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/1339 Make sure you set the search type to expression, and you can use control-enter to search across all folders.

By: Ralph Dosser

Ralph Dosser — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:21:17 +0000

How do you archive? Do you throw everything in one folder, or do you break it down?

I’ve been using year/month folders (IE archive/2008/03), but that makes searching awkward. I wish there was a way to search on a folder and have it include all the sub-folders.