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Global search not working although global-messages-db.sqlite deleted and index recreated

marina.bastianello
marina.bastianello
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In the past weeks I have been experiencing HUGE problems with global search, which I had been successfully using for years. The search function now has an erratic behaviour, in that - depending which search term I am using - it will only find a few (but not all) messages containing such term, and will miss certain folders altogether, although global search is enabled on them. Sometimes it will miss some folders, some other times other folders. The behaviour for each search term is however consistent, in that for a single search term it will always yield the same (incomplete) result. All messages are on the other hand correctly identified if I perform the local search within a single folder, which I imagine means the messages are indexed correctly. I did delete the global-messages-db.sqlite file as instructed, but this made no change. My message database is large (over 800k mb), and I have approx 20 different folders. They are all however essential messages, so I cannot reduce its size in any way. Any suggestions? I really really need to get this sorted. ps I initially thought this malfunctioning had been caused by the update to the newer Thunderbird version, however I reverted back to version 52.9.1, with no improvement whatsoever. Does a 64bit version exist?

In the past weeks I have been experiencing HUGE problems with global search, which I had been successfully using for years. The search function now has an erratic behaviour, in that - depending which search term I am using - it will only find a few (but not all) messages containing such term, and will miss certain folders altogether, although global search is enabled on them. Sometimes it will miss some folders, some other times other folders. The behaviour for each search term is however consistent, in that for a single search term it will always yield the same (incomplete) result. All messages are on the other hand correctly identified if I perform the local search within a single folder, which I imagine means the messages are indexed correctly. I did delete the global-messages-db.sqlite file as instructed, but this made no change. My message database is large (over 800k mb), and I have approx 20 different folders. They are all however essential messages, so I cannot reduce its size in any way. Any suggestions? I really really need to get this sorted. ps I initially thought this malfunctioning had been caused by the update to the newer Thunderbird version, however I reverted back to version 52.9.1, with no improvement whatsoever. Does a 64bit version exist?

All Replies (1)

marina.bastianello
marina.bastianello Question owner
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Problem solved. I found the solution here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1362383 Brilliant! Apparently there is a limit of 1,000 messages as default number of search results. This needs to be raised by following the instructions contained in the link above. I have now set the limit to 100,000 and hope this will not give rise to some other problem. For the time being it seems to be working...