You appear to have made an assumption about it being able to search for multiple terms.

Have you a link to any documentation that describes it working as you suppose it should?

The Thunderbird Global Search documentation mentions it: Searching for multiple terms "If you enclose multiple terms within quotation marks, Thunderbird will search for the words as a phrase. That is, the search results will only contain messages that have all the words in the order they are specified in the search field."

Dr3Bob said

The Thunderbird Global Search documentation mentions it: Searching for multiple terms "If you enclose multiple terms within quotation marks, Thunderbird will search for the words as a phrase. That is, the search results will only contain messages that have all the words in the order they are specified in the search field."

That is my understanding of it.

But the search is still exactly for what you typed. so "Mary Jane" will not match "Mary hit Jane"

I search my first name and get some 1500 hits add my surname and it drops to just over a thousand. SO It appears to be working for me.

What exact term are you searching?

Perhaps your search index is rubbish and needs to be rebuilt. On the toolbar > Help > Troubleshooting Information

Click the show profile button in Troubleshooting Information Close Thunderbird In the file window that opened, delete the file global- messages-db.sqlite Restart Thunderbird.

The search will be rubbish until the file fully regenerates, which could take a whole day if you have 10 or 20Gb of mail. You can monitor the status of that using the Activity Manager.

Thank you for the link. There's a lot of documentation here that I am not sufficiently familiar with.

As Matt has reported, I too find that it works as the article describes, so I'd go along with the indexing theory.

I find that as a guide on using global search, that article less than satisfactory. It mentions one wildcard character ('*') and suggests it can only be used at the end of a search. That's something of a limitation for me. It doesn't make any mention of any characters that receive special attention; we have seen evidence that suggests a lot of punctuation and characters which are treated as punctuation in certain contexts is all ignored.

So all in all I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that is is capable of matching a specific search string, but even then we can't be sure about how many of the other conditions (case insensitive, ignoring special characters) are still being applied.