re :When I try to search for a previous quote to verify the pricing,

Try to think more around this issue to help with searching. Decimal points are known as decimal points to you and me because they are used with numbers eg: £10.50 In text search terms you're talking about 'full stops' or 'periods'. Can you now imagine what you are actually searching for...every email with a full stop.!!!

Try some other ideas to get around the issue: Use Quick Filter on folder for a characture eg: £ in the 'Body' Global Search is likely not to locate full stops or £

Suggest you use this method: 'Edit' > 'Find' > 'Search Messages' or 'Menu icon' > 'Find' > 'Search Messages' choose folder or account name

'Body' 'contains' and enter £ or 45.80/m

Suggest you also select a date range as you wouldn't want to copy a price that is more than x months/years as it may be out of date and could cause an embarasment. 'Age in Days' 'is less than' set a number

clickon 'Search'

The quote may be for an item, so perhaps search on the item instead. If a person was enquiring about an email sent with a quote, then you could easilly search for email address of that person.

If you categorise your products with a Tag, then you could also use that to help with search. So if sold shoes to someone, I could apply a tag called 'footwear' to that email. the Tag would help me to locate it in a search.

I appreciate the extensive response and the attention shown to my question.

Unfortunately this only serves a plan for moving forward and doesn't aid in finding previous emails. I really need to be able search back though years' worth of emails in multiple folders, entered by multiple users to find a "dollar and cents" quote.

Based on your information, it doesn't seem to be possible, given that the decimal reads as a stop/period.

So unless there's an alternative method to specifically search for XX.XX that you haven't mentioned, I'm pretty much out of luck.

thank you anyway

I would suggest using an add-on that offers regular expression searches. The FiltaQuilla add-on comes to mind, but it doesn't (IIRC) offer body text search. For that, I'd use the Expression Search/Gmail UI add-on.

So an expression such as [0-9]+\.[0-9]+ would find a decimal point sandwiched between two (or more) numerics. You could even add in a currency symbol if appropriate: [$£€][0-9]+\.[0-9]+

If you write currency terms with a space e.g. £ 51.56 then you need to accomodate that too:

[$£€] *[0-9]+\.[0-9]+

I'd couple it with a Saved Search to cover all the appropriate folders.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-saved-searches

PS If you actually do need to search for a specific value then it would be on the lines of

45\.80\/m

dissection:

• literal '4'
• followed by literal '5'
• followed by a period but we need a backslash to disable its special meaning in regular expressions hence '\.'
• literal '8' and literal '0'
• '/' but again escaped by \ because / is used to formulate regular expressions so '\/'
• finally literal 'm'

If it could be either m or M then you either make the whole expression case insensitive:

/45\.80\/m/i

where /…/i means case insensitive

or you could do

45\.80\/[mM]

which would allow either m or M to match.

In addition to Zenios comment and just to reiterate: If I use : Global Search then I cannot get it to locate exact monetary info containing a dot/period. So it fails just like you say.

BUT if I use:

'Edit' > 'Find' > 'Search Messages'

or 'Menu icon' > 'Find' > 'Search Messages' choose account name so it checks all folders in that account.

I can easilly search for items such as $21.50 or £32.50 then I can save my search results as a folder, so making it easier to locate in future. So it works perfectly ok for me by this other search method.