why does thunderbird only display searches from last year
Hi,
I want to analyze the mail traffic I've gotten on specific search terms within the mail box of my business to gauge when I will spend most time emailing customers.
When I search for "bookings" all I get is the 2016 results, however I want to see the results from all years. Thunderbird searches have always been set to Global in my preferences (so the help item on your forum doesn't help.) I've also tried searching for: [ "Bookings" "2015" ] but then the scope cuts off the results from the first half of 2015 as there's also a lot of results in 2016, which is very inaccurate as of course I received a lot of emails in the first half of 2015 as well.
Chosen solution
I think you may need to use a Saved Search.
This allows you to use a more precise and multi-ruled search, using what is essentially the Message Filters tool and its dialogue. And you can enhance this with the FiltaQuilla and Expression Search/GmailUI add-ons to give you more powerful searches with regular expressions (and additional actions for your filters.)
The Saved Search also requires or allows you to specify which folders to search, so if you have a sensible filing system, you can narrow it down to only appropriate folders and get a better signal-to-noise ratio.
And a Saved Search that presents all the messages pertaining to a single topic in one folder makes the QuickFilter bar an attractive additional tool for searching too.
One final thought; I use an add-on, Mail Summaries, that re-uses the "account central" and "home" pages to present you with some statistical data about your email usage. It tells me about what time of day I do most emailing, and the ratio of new to reply messages, along with most frequently used correspondents and tags. It may not go as deep into the data as you intend to go, but may give you some shortcuts.
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Look in your Synchronization & Storage settings and increase the length kept OR globally remove any restrictions by date in which case previous years will be in 'archives' > $year
The settings look as if they'd be all right (see printscreen). But still just a selection of my mail shows up.
Is there perhaps another way of searching through my mail more specifically? like using search: DateRange:=2015/1/1-2015/4/30 ?
Chosen Solution
I think you may need to use a Saved Search.
This allows you to use a more precise and multi-ruled search, using what is essentially the Message Filters tool and its dialogue. And you can enhance this with the FiltaQuilla and Expression Search/GmailUI add-ons to give you more powerful searches with regular expressions (and additional actions for your filters.)
The Saved Search also requires or allows you to specify which folders to search, so if you have a sensible filing system, you can narrow it down to only appropriate folders and get a better signal-to-noise ratio.
And a Saved Search that presents all the messages pertaining to a single topic in one folder makes the QuickFilter bar an attractive additional tool for searching too.
One final thought; I use an add-on, Mail Summaries, that re-uses the "account central" and "home" pages to present you with some statistical data about your email usage. It tells me about what time of day I do most emailing, and the ratio of new to reply messages, along with most frequently used correspondents and tags. It may not go as deep into the data as you intend to go, but may give you some shortcuts.
Thx, Expression Search/GmailUI fixed the problem :)