Thunderbird Search

[michaelmacho]

Hi Everyone

I am new to Thunderbird and Mint Linux as my daily driver. After many issues with Outlook and Windows I decided to make the shift to Linux and Thunderbird. I really appreciate everyone's help in getting this working.

In the past with outlook, I am able to sort the INBOX using the FROM person filed and click on a message and type using the keyboard letters that correspond to the persons name and it would then go directly to a list of emails from that person. IE:

Tim Smith
Tim Smith
Tim Smith

Keyboard Strokes Entered: Tim

It would then go to all of the emails from Tim Smith that are located in the INBOX.

This was an easy way to find emails from people that said. Did you get this email. Or I sent you an email can you help me etc.

I have tried this many times and does not seem to work. I have also downloaded many search add ins that looked like it might work and have yet to be able to get this functionality working.

If anyone knows how i can get this to work or has a similar work around please let me know.

Thank you
Michael

[T6&sfpER35%]

i don't use thunderbird so can't help there ,don't know how it search work but i can imagine the mainstream linux email client would have that sorted.
anyway ,i use mailspring ,and don't have any troubles searching / finding emails.
just a thought, might want to look into it . or not .

[michaelmacho]

Thank you - I looked into Mindspring and it does not support Microsoft Exchange. do you know if there is an add on or way for it to support Exchange accounts.

[TheFu]

I use thunderbird. It has Quick Filters and a Full deep search.

Quick filters: Show the FROM entry if it isn't already in the message list. There is a customize button for that view. Click on the header button, FROM, in this case to sort ascending or descending, then click the "quick filter" button and begin typing. That doesn't search just FROM, but all the major fields.

Deeper Search: If that isn't sufficient, you can press "<c><s>-F" which will bring up the "Find" search box
Anywhere there is a down-carrot "V", that's a selection menu. By default, the first search will have "Subject" ----> change that to FROM, leave the "contains" alone and type in the empty text entry.
tb-find.jpg

At the very top of the Search Messages window, there's a "Search for messages in:" choice/selector. Local Folders is 100% client-side searching. If you are connecting to an imap server, then let the server do the searching - it will be much faster. I run an IMAP server for a number of reasons, but one is so the server can index and search the years and years of messages.

Other Search Tools: If you only have local messages, there are other search tools like Recoll, which are like having a local google just for your machine. Recoll does soundex searches, so it finds things that aren't exact matches for the query in addition to the things that are. In understands the different extensions and will show other words in the root-word family. The downside to Recoll is that indexing is necessary. The search DB isn't live, but only has data from the last time the index was run.
Recoll isn't just for email, but for all files on your system.

Because you asked about email, I'll just list locate and find as other tools. They won't find emails, but they will find files on the box if you know part of the filename. Locate needs an index.

Find searches the file system and is an amazing tool, but not so easy to use. Searching by partial name, date modified, permissions, owner, group, file size, creation date, and a few other file metadata items is possible. But is is a file system scan, which can take time.

[TheFu]

Thank you - I looked into Mindspring and it does not support Microsoft Exchange. do you know if there is an add on or way for it to support Exchange accounts.

All email clients follow standards.
All email servers follow standards.
Any client can be used with any server, IME. Just look at the standards provided in the server-support-pages, and enter those into the client-connection pages.

MS-Outlook, the client-side email client, connects to any email server that supports standards. Those tend to be POP3S or IMAPS. There are standards for receiving emails and for sending emails.
Thunderbird supports those same standards.

Typically, sending email uses port 587/tcp and starttls for end-user clients to send email using the SMTPS protocol through a specific, authenticated, email server.
Receiving email uses port 993/tcp for IMAPS to receive. The server for sending and the server for receiving can be the same or different physical machines.

Any email server that doesn't support those standards is broke. Call the support line and get the connection information for SMTPS and IMAPS. Most ISPs have email connection pages with this information. Mindspring is an ISP. https://getmailspring.com/setup/acce...-via-imap-smtp is theirs. Using IMAP on port 143/tcp is a security failure, IMHO.

Email clients can point at different servers with multiple accounts and different connection settings for each.

If you seek a more bloated email client to use on Linux, similar to MS-Outlook, there is Evolution. Last time I used email on Windows, there were 2 programs that were so bloated more RAM had to be bought. MS-Outlook was one and iTunes was the other.

Thunderbird can do most things that MS-Outlook does, but it has a different philosophy, so things aren't exactly the same.

Gmail supports both IMAPS and authenticated SMTPS for receiving and sending email, but they push really hard for people to use a browser, not a full email client. That's because they can slurp more data from a browser than they can from an email client, but they will also claim that full email clients are less secure. Perhaps, in the google world, that is true. In the rest of the world, where we firewall repeated, failed, email login attempts and can lock down where those attempts are allowed from, I strongly disagree.

[coffeecat]

Thread moved to Mint sub-forum.

[michaelmacho]

Thank you
I do not want to use outlook. Exchange has very specific protacalls and the email client has to support them. IMAP and POP while supported by exchange is not open on the server and so you need to have a email client that works with "Exchange" normally most 3rd party email client apps have a plugin and reference support for Exchange.
In fact I believe on Mindsprings web site it says it does not support Exchange.

Thank you I will try this and advise.

[TheFu]

Thank you
I do not want to use outlook. Exchange has very specific protacalls and the email client has to support them. IMAP and POP while supported by exchange is not open on the server and so you need to have a email client that works with "Exchange" normally most 3rd party email client apps have a plugin and reference support for Exchange.
In fact I believe on Mindsprings web site it says it does not support Exchange.

Microsoft has a long history of breaking standards and using proprietary protocols. Their email server is broken if they don't follow standards. Period.

[michaelmacho]

Microsoft has a long history of breaking standards and using proprietary protocols. Their email server is broken if they don't follow standards. Period.

yes they do and it is very frustrating. This is one reason i changed over to Linux for my Daily Driver. I am now just trying to figure a number of things out. The

TheFu -
Thank you - These are some good work around to what i was originally asking. For some reason I do not see the search screen you are talking about. I attached an image of what i think you are talking about in order to get the screen shot you attached.


i was able to search Chris and it then would display all the emails for Chris etc.

Also I am attaching another screen shot with hopes that I can better explain what I am trying to do. In the below image as you can see it is sorted using FROM and I would like to highlight one of the emails. Then type Goo or UDM and it would automatically advance to the Google emails or UDM emails. Make sense? I know I was able to do this in my previous email client so i thought i would ask if there is a way to do this in Thunderbird or use an add on of some sort that would then allow this sort of functionality.

[TheFu]

In your first image, do you see the right side where it says "Filter messages by:...." deselect all but the Sender. enter "goo" and only the from with "goo" inside will show up in the list. Press 'n' to move to the next unread message. There are lots and lots of quick keys in most programs, including thunderbird. Over time, they become muscle memory, so I couldn't tell you what each is ... there must be a page somewhere with all of them listed by the current view. I use n, p, m all the time.

Moving on ... did you see the image I attached above with the Find window?
press "<ctl><shft>-F" which will bring up the "Find" search box. That's the more powerful search for TB. Dbl-clicking a message there opens a new window with just that message. That can be handy if you want to process lots of similar messages back to back.

Probably nothing you haven't considered already, but maybe not. Some other email handling ideas follow.
For me, all email clients see the same view on the server - thunderbird, nextcloud, K9-Mail, Claws, mutt, or any tool I use on android. All inbound messages get tagged/filtered. Thunderbird can use filters that see different parts of the message, then move the message to a different folder. That folder can be local or on the IMAP server. I don't to client-side filters or tagging, but most people don't run a powerful email server like I do.

Because I use 5+ different email clients/machines daily. I'd go nuts if I had to see a message that was already handled twice. Once handled, it is done and either deleted or moved to an archive folder. The client used doesn't matter.

For Junk management, anything that looks like junk either to the email gateway, email server, or any active client, gets moved to a spam folder on the server before I ever see it. Some junk is deleted immediately - like anything with "bitcoin" in it. Thunderbird can be trained to recognize junk automatically. With a few hundred junk emails, the recognition isn't too bad.

Have you looked at the email filter capabilities built into Thunderbird? If all you have is client-side filtering/organization, then it isn't too bad. Select a message, then in the Message menu choose Create Filter from message ... automation is good. I didn't see an accel key-chord to show that window.