works for me on an English version.

If I press Ctrl+Shift+F and set the criteria to date the default value of 20/3/2015 is inserted. Obviously this search works.

If you do he same and type the date with the "/" does it work?

I am wondering where to file the bug with that question. I am guessing is is a localization issue.

please try the following. Start Thunderbird while holding the shift key.

Once in safe mode try again. Does it work?

Hi Matt, thanks for your interest and sorry for my late reply, I didn't forget nor I gave up... just a bit too busy during worktime- Anyway, as you can see the Thunderbird problem seems here to stay; being unable to perform a search by dates is seriously undermining the usability of the client. I've performed the tests as you suggested (safe mode), I got no evidence of a different behaviour but I've took a few screenshots that might give a better understanding of this 'italian' (?) issue. If you have time, please have a look at them, your opinion and support will be highly appreciated. Thanks for your help - take care, Walter

2 image sets attached

Off the wall suggestion.

check in control panel under date and time that the short date has the slashes. Once you have done that I will see about filing a bug in the localization, as I understand at this point is is only the Italian version that is affected.

just posted date settings in TB & W7. tnx

I never used slash but "-" and in reverse order 2015-04-20 and it works

Hi Gnospen, it seems harder than that... I gave a try to what you suggested but things doesn't seem to change at all. See the attached screenshots I just made. I still stick to Matt's first idea that this could be a localization issue... maybe you're not affected since you are using a US or Swedish version of Thunderbird, but this problem occurs on the *Italian* version of the client, though all the date and time settings seem to be perfectly consistent on W7 and TB as well (as per what I've shown in last attachment). I remember date searching was perfectly working, then, after a program update during 2014, it was gone. All my colleagues who don't have the autoupdate feature active, are still searching happily by date with their old versions Anyway, thanks for your interest.

Will you open about:config and check what mailnews.search_date_format is set to. Mine is set to default = 0 and that gives 2015-04-30 (for me) (Tools / Option / advanced /general / config editor and search for that entry)

edit I tested some variants. take a look

Hi Gnospen, I think your hint solves this issue. You can find in the attachments the situation before and after the modification (basically, I just added "/" as a user setting in the

mailnews.search_date_separator

previously blank). Searching by date seems back to normal... Maybe it was very simple but I had no idea of where to look, without your advice. I still wonder how's that manual addition of the slashes in the search field (though not fully satisfactory a solution, since it had to be set every time) didn't do the work, anyway... I'm 100% sure I never edited this before, so it must have been reset to this value by one of the updates last year. A web search using this parameter name led me to find the following link in italian http://forum.mozillaitalia.org/index.php?topic=61987.0 It seems someone with the same problem received a suggestion practically identical to the one you gave, and it was Nov2014, though being a punctual solution for a couple of users, it seems to me this led to no general modification od the sources. The article says that affected versions started with 31.0 and up to 31.5 there seems not to be a sign of general correction. Is there a way so that this change can be fixed at distribution level? I hope so, for the benefit of at least all the users of the italian localization. Once again, thanks to you and Matt for your kind interest and help. Best regards, Walter Italy