I'm looking for an offline e-mail client with search like Gmail.

LAPIII · 3 Feb 2016, 02:36 AM

I prefer Windows but I will use the Linux as well. Gmail will search in all e-mail fields including the body. Thunderbird doesn't do this as it claims, so I want to know if you know of an e-mail client that does this.

emoore · 3 Feb 2016, 08:19 AM

All of the Thunderbird documentation I've read only claims that it can search the "subject, message body, From address, To address, etc. " . i.e. whats normally visible when headers are set to normal.There are multiple search methods such as global search, quick filter bar search, classic search, and enhancements if you install add-ons such as "FiltaQuilla" or "Expression Search / Google Mail".

I have no problem searching the message body using Thunderbird though if you use Global Search it helps a lot to use double quotes to avoid it searching for individual words when you really wanted it to search for an entire string.

There is a View control that you can add to the toolbar by right clicking on it, selecting customize, dragging the View widget to the toolbar, and then pressing Done. It has some predefined views such as All, Unread, Not Deleted, etc. It also supports custom views. If you select customize -> new and select customize... at the bottom of the Subject listbox you can have it search for custom headers that are normally ignored such as Received:.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers

For example, I added a Received headers view that tests whether the "Received" header "contains" "messagingengine.com". I've tested that with several accounts and it appears to only list messages where the Received: header contains the substring messagingengine.com. I also added a custom view that tested whether the "Reply-to" header "contains" "mozillazine.org" . It also appears to work.

If you do this do not add the ':' in the header name when defining the custom header.The main limitation appears to be that you can't type the search criteria for the Custom View on the fly like you can when doing a normal search.

chrisretusn · 3 Feb 2016, 05:53 PM

While I have a Gmail account, I have never used the search feature so I have no idea how it works. You might be interested in Claws Mail. It has powerful search features especially when using extended search. It's my client of choice. One reason I don't use the search feature in Gmail is nothing left to search for after I pop the account.

A quote from the user manual:

Quote:

There are several methods for searching your emails.

One of them is relatively standard, and can be found in the "Edit" menu, it's the "Search folder..." item. This will open a window where you can specify one or more fields to search in: From, To, Subject, and Body. After having specified your criteria, click on the "Back" or "Forward" buttons to navigate through the matching emails, or use "Find all" to select all the matching emails at once. Be aware that searching for text in the body of emails is much slower than searching in its headers, because the body of emails isn't cached by Claws Mail. "Extended Search" mode can be turned on by clicking the relevant checkbox, thus allowing you to use match expressions like those used in "Filtering" rules.

If you're looking at a large email and want to find a particular part of it, you can use the "Find in current message..." item of the "Edit" menu. This works like search in a text document.

The final way of searching for emails is using "Quick Search", which you can display or hide by cilicking the little magnifying glass icon under the Message List. It is also accessible from the "Quick Search" item of the "Edit" menu. "Quick Search" is more powerful than the normal search as it can search in standard headers (From, To, Subject) or in "Extended" mode using just about any criteria you can think of. When in "Extended" mode, the "Information" button is visible, enabling you to see the search syntax. An "Edit" button is also available which allows you to quickly create a rule. You can also configure "Quick Search" to search recursively through subfolders, whether it should reset itself when you change folders, and whether to use Type-ahead search (this is a search which results update dynamically if you pause in the typing).

When you hit Enter after having specified the search string, the Message List will shrink to present you with only the matching messages. If you set the search to be recursive, any subfolder of the current one that has matching emails will change its icon to a magnifying glass icon. This way, you can search in your whole mailbox at once. If the search is in Sticky mode, the filter will stay applied when you go to another folder. This can be disturbing at first, as you can forget about it, but is useful in some cases, for example if you want to search in the body of emails and are not sure of which folder contains the searched email: a recursive search on the body of emails in a whole mailbox can be really slow.

Slow depends I guess. My global searches across all mall boxes does not take long at all.

libCognition · 5 Feb 2016, 01:47 AM

I suspect you won't like my answer, but fwiw I'll mention grepmail. This is a PERL-based linux tool that specializes in searching e-mail. You give it one (or more) regular expressions, each of which can match a header field or the body. If your mail client is standard, and thus the mail is stored in a standard format like mbox, the tool will extract all messages that match the expression and produce a new temporary mbox file. You can then launch any standard mail client to open the mbox.

The linux philosophy is to have small tools each specializing, so you don't get 100 different mail client developers each reinventing the wheel. Grepmail demonstrates that philosophy, although it would be nice if mail clients would incorporate a grepmail interface so the user isn't needlessly exposed to it.

LAPIII · 5 Feb 2016, 06:06 AM

In Windows,I can't connect Gmail to Claws Mail. In Gmail I had enabled IMAP and in Claws Mail I had followed these instructions.Yet I got error message

Code:

Connection to imap.gmail.com failed: login refused.

Here's the log:

Code:

* Account 'Account!': Connecting to IMAP4 server imap.gmail,com:993...
[16:55:16} IMAP4< ' OK Gimap ready for requests from 2601:144:200:lb5f:8c4b:6786:b51c:ebcf
u207mb43095891qka
" IMAP connection is un-authenticated
[16:55:16] IMAP4> 1 CAPABILITY
[16:55:16] IMAP4< * CAPABILITY IMAP4revl UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA ID XUST
CHILDREN X-GM-EXT-1 XYZZY SASL-IR AUTH=XOAUTH2 AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=PLAIN-
CUENTTOKEN AUTH=OAUTHBEARER AUTH=XOAUTH
[16:55:16] IMAP4< 1 OK Thats all she wrote! u207mb43095891qka
[16:55:16] IMAP4> Logging Webprenuer@gmail.com to imap.gmail.com using LOGIN
[16:55:17] IMAP4< Please log in via your web browser: https://support.google.com/mail/
accounts/answer/78754 (Failure)
*"IMAP4< Alert: Please log in via your web browser: https://support.google.com/mail/
accounts/answer/78754 (Failure)
"IMAP error on imap.gmail.com: LOGIN error
[16:55:17] IMAP4< Error logging in to imap.gmail.com
[16:55:33] IMAP4> Logging Webprenuer@gmail.com to imap.gmail.com using LOGIN
[16:55:33] IMAP4< Invalid credentials (Failure)
"IMAP error on imap.gmail.com: LOGIN error
[16:55:33] IMAP4< Error logging in to imap.gmail.com
[16:55:51] IMAP4> 4 LOGOUT
[16:55:51] IMAP4< ' BYE Logout Requested u207mb43095891qka
[16:55:51] IMAP4< 4 OK Quoth the raven, nevermore... u207mb43095891qka

I will try installing grepmail with Gmail.

chrisretusn · 5 Feb 2016, 07:10 AM

Did you enable IMAP in Gmail?

**ReuvenNY** · 5 Feb 2016, 09:35 PM

My simple solution was to create a Gmail account to which all my Fastmail (or any other service) emails are automatically redirected.
So my Gmail is a mirror account of the Fastmail one, and search is a breeze.

3 Feb 2016, 02:36 AM	#1
LAPIII Junior Member Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 22	I'm looking for an offline e-mail client with search like Gmail. I prefer Windows but I will use the Linux as well. Gmail will search in all e-mail fields including the body. Thunderbird doesn't do this as it claims, so I want to know if you know of an e-mail client that does this. Last edited by LAPIII : 3 Feb 2016 at 02:44 AM.

3 Feb 2016, 08:19 AM	#2
emoore Essential Contributor Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 280	All of the Thunderbird documentation I've read only claims that it can search the "subject, message body, From address, To address, etc. " . i.e. whats normally visible when headers are set to normal.There are multiple search methods such as global search, quick filter bar search, classic search, and enhancements if you install add-ons such as "FiltaQuilla" or "Expression Search / Google Mail". I have no problem searching the message body using Thunderbird though if you use Global Search it helps a lot to use double quotes to avoid it searching for individual words when you really wanted it to search for an entire string. There is a View control that you can add to the toolbar by right clicking on it, selecting customize, dragging the View widget to the toolbar, and then pressing Done. It has some predefined views such as All, Unread, Not Deleted, etc. It also supports custom views. If you select customize -> new and select customize... at the bottom of the Subject listbox you can have it search for custom headers that are normally ignored such as Received:. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers For example, I added a Received headers view that tests whether the "Received" header "contains" "messagingengine.com". I've tested that with several accounts and it appears to only list messages where the Received: header contains the substring messagingengine.com. I also added a custom view that tested whether the "Reply-to" header "contains" "mozillazine.org" . It also appears to work. If you do this do not add the ':' in the header name when defining the custom header.The main limitation appears to be that you can't type the search criteria for the Custom View on the fly like you can when doing a normal search.

5 Feb 2016, 01:47 AM	#4
libCognition Member Join Date: Sep 2011 Posts: 76	I suspect you won't like my answer, but fwiw I'll mention grepmail. This is a PERL-based linux tool that specializes in searching e-mail. You give it one (or more) regular expressions, each of which can match a header field or the body. If your mail client is standard, and thus the mail is stored in a standard format like mbox, the tool will extract all messages that match the expression and produce a new temporary mbox file. You can then launch any standard mail client to open the mbox. The linux philosophy is to have small tools each specializing, so you don't get 100 different mail client developers each reinventing the wheel. Grepmail demonstrates that philosophy, although it would be nice if mail clients would incorporate a grepmail interface so the user isn't needlessly exposed to it.

5 Feb 2016, 07:10 AM	#6
chrisretusn Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Philippines Posts: 846	Did you enable IMAP in Gmail?

5 Feb 2016, 09:35 PM	#7
ReuvenNY Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: New York Posts: 4,259	My simple solution was to create a Gmail account to which all my Fastmail (or any other service) emails are automatically redirected. So my Gmail is a mirror account of the Fastmail one, and search is a breeze.