Andrew Sutherland's dashboard

This sounds like a different problem. I would create a separate support request or look for another message that conveys your problem better. If you want to see what the indexer is completely up to, you can follow the instructions at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:... – Andrew Sutherland, on December 15, 2009 01:09

Currently, changing the global indexing setting only has an effect when you restart the program. (This is a known limitation that is being tracked to be fixed.)

If you look in your profile folder, you will find a global-messages-db.sqlite file. (You can learn about profile folders here: http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunde...)

It is processing the deletion of the messages you removed. For performance reasons deletion processing only takes small bites which manifests as a constantly increasing count. At least until it completes. Then it stops.

(There isn't a better string because the functionality was implemented after string changes were forbidden so the localizers would have a stable target.)

and everyone's error console has the "Ci.nsIJunkMailPlugin.IS_SPAM_SCORE is undefined" bit reported by David Brinkmann?

So your Thunderbird 3 RC1 build worked, but when you upgraded to RC2, it stopped working? – Andrew Sutherland, on December 03, 2009 19:20

When you say installed "over", do you mean in the same directory? I think that leads to bad problems, such as the one you are experiencing here.

STEEL in Thunderbird 3.0 is basically just Firefox's FUEL with the name changed. It provides many useful mozilla platform abstractions, but nothing Thunderbird specific. (The original proposal and prototype implementation did have some Thunderbird-specific functionality, but they were never fully completed and were not landed.)

The current game-plan is to release a version of Jetpack for Thunderbird 3.0 that follows the original noble goals of STEEL: providing APIs that make Thunderbird extension development easy. Experimental versions of the extension(s) should probably be available starting in two weeks with an approved version hopefully not too long after. We will make continuous enhancements to this extension and the APIs it provides.

We will likely look to move the Thunderbird-specific parts into STEEL (or something equivalent we that we ambiguously refer to as STEEL for documentation purposes) for Thunderbird 3.x. It will probably be quite some time before Jetpack itself gets merged into Thunderbird. (Likely not until it gets merged into Firefox / the mozilla platform and a Thunderbird build based on that happens).

Thunderbird's "saved search" functionality provides the ability to define a "virtual folder" that is a search defined over multiple search folders. So you could create a folder called "Bob" that is the result of a search on Bob's e-mails across multiple folders.

With Thunderbird 3 (currently on beta 4) you can then filter these messages (as you type) based on the subject/body/other, as well as use "mail views" to filter so only messages with certain tags are shown, etc. (The "mail views" functionality is based on the same underlying functionality as the saved search; you can also create a saved search that shows all the messages with a specific tag, etc.)

These folders are updated as new messages arrive, so it's pretty efficient.

The timeline widget can be used to approximate the time constraints you speak of. It starts out disabled by default right now, but if you click on the bar-graph-looking icon to the right of the description of the search, it will appear and you can click on the various things to constrain the time range.

Clicking on a bar constrains to the time range the bar covers. Clicking on one of the axis labels constrains to whatever the axis covers. Unlabeled things on the axis are weeks.

Hope that's helpful!

Although the implementation supports this, we haven't yet exposed it via the user interface. We are working on search refinement, but the changes for this specific problem will likely not happen until a release after Thunderbird 3.0. An extension could attempt to address it, though.

One thing you might try is to find the "Ryan" that you are interested in finding messages from in the auto-complete list. We do not require that the person be in your address book in order to display them in the list. The list is weighted by how many messages you have sent to/received from each e-mail address, so if you communicate with Ryan frequently, he should be earlier in the list. We do not yet have a concept of more recent senders/recipients being bumped up in the list, but we are thinking about it.

There are three main possibilities:

1) Thunderbird is filtering the messages it displays to you. Make sure that in the main menu under "View... Threads..." that "All" is selected. Make sure that if there is a "View... Messages..." menu that "All" is selected there as well. (That menu only shows up if you customized your toolbar to add the mail views combo-box to your toolbar. It would be the one labeled "View:".)

You may also want to verify that "View... Sort By..." does not have "Grouped by Sort" selected. In beta 2, the grouping logic was moderately buggy.

2) The junk detector has gone crazy and you have it configured to move messages to another folder. The messages would still show up in the mbox file until they are compacted, so mboxview could be misleading. You can easily check this by making sure that the messages are not all in your junk folder.

3) The .msf index files have become corrupted. If you right-click on a folder in the folder pane and choose "Properties", there is a "Rebuild Index" button. If you click it, it will attempt to regenerate the index from your mbox file. If you decide to pursue this option, you may want to upgrade to Thunderbird 3 beta 3 first, as it is much better about reindexing (and not corrupting things) than beta 2.