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How can I search for an exact string match in my emails?

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I was looking for an old email that I had about Re-Animator The Musical. So, in the search bar in the upper right corner of the Thunderbird window, I typed "re-animator". I got 59 hits, and the message that actually contained the string "re-animator" was 27th, when sorted by relevance. All of the other hits were emails which contained the word "animal" or "animals", which to me has nothing to do with "re-animator". I'm surprised that those were considered hits at all, much less that they were considered more relevant than the one message which actually contained the desired string.

I actually tried three different searches:

reanimator

re-animator

"re-animator"

(i. e. the first two were without quotes and the third was with quotes). All three of these variations had the same problem, though, that messages containing "animal" were ranked before the message containing "re-animator".

The desired message contained the word "Re-Animator" (with that capitalization and hyphenation), and also contained "reanimatorthemusical" as part of a URL that was mentioned in the message. So, I would have expected both the search with the hyphen and the search without the hyphen to have been good hits for this message.

My question is: How can I tell Thunderbird to search for messages that literally contain the string I ask for, and not get "creative" with the matches, as it seems to be doing for some reason?

(I'm using Thunderbird 31.3.0 on Mac OS X 10.9.5.)

I was looking for an old email that I had about Re-Animator The Musical. So, in the search bar in the upper right corner of the Thunderbird window, I typed "re-animator". I got 59 hits, and the message that actually contained the string "re-animator" was 27th, when sorted by relevance. All of the other hits were emails which contained the word "animal" or "animals", which to me has nothing to do with "re-animator". I'm surprised that those were considered hits at all, much less that they were considered more relevant than the one message which actually contained the desired string. I actually tried three different searches: reanimator re-animator "re-animator" (i. e. the first two were without quotes and the third was with quotes). All three of these variations had the same problem, though, that messages containing "animal" were ranked before the message containing "re-animator". The desired message contained the word "Re-Animator" (with that capitalization and hyphenation), and also contained "reanimatorthemusical" as part of a URL that was mentioned in the message. So, I would have expected both the search with the hyphen and the search without the hyphen to have been good hits for this message. My question is: How can I tell Thunderbird to search for messages that literally contain the string I ask for, and not get "creative" with the matches, as it seems to be doing for some reason? (I'm using Thunderbird 31.3.0 on Mac OS X 10.9.5.)

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I performed a similar test using the word Re-Formatting.

I noticed that the result seemed to ignore the hyphen. So, 'Formatting' was returned. so in your case, what happens if you search for:

"Animator" musical

or "Animator The Musical" in quotes to denote a phrase

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search

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No, searching for:

"Animator" musical

still has the exact same problem: it still wants to find "animal" instead of "animator". Why?

Yes, I had already read the support article you linked to, but I hadn't found anything in it about why Thunderbird would prefer "animal" over "animator", or how to disable this misfeature. Is there no better documentation for the search bar than that?

(And the search for "Animator The Musical" didn't find my message, simply because my message didn't contain that exact string. It contained "I am on a waiting list for some musical tickets for Sunday, but I haven't heard back yet. It is a preview of The Re-Animator. ( http://www.reanimatorthemusical.com/ )." The search for "Animator The Musical" only had a single hit, your message in which you suggest searching for that.)