User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 0.9 (20041103) When using the quick search set to 'Entire Message', or the 'Search Messages - > Body' search (which is actually confusingly named differently, but that's another issue) the search also returns matched messages in which the search term appears inside a base64 encoded part of the message, rather than just the text in a multi-part message. So, when i was searching for a particular search term 'sek7', the search returned 75 messages instead of the 14 returned by Outlook Express in the same folder. Further investigation revealed that the particular string appears in certain parts of base64 encoded attachments. E.g., here's a small part of the message source that shows where the search feature found the match for 'sek7': "j2Ax7SQJ0kFRHtsJeQ8HsEK7pvqtjek9u+I" Of course, this is normally not a big problem when you're searching for words in the dictionary (there's only a very small chance that they'd appear as part of a base64 encoded part, esp. with longer words). But when you're looking for short technical terms without spaces, this is rather inconvenient. Most people don't know or care that their attachments are encoded in a certain way, and when they're searching for text, they don't want to get back seemingly random matches. So instead, when using the 'Body'/'Entire Message' function on multi-part emails, it should only search in specific parts of the message: those parts that directly represent text. Not only will this solve the problems above, it should also speed up the search dramatically when you have many messages with attachments in them, because these attachments generally represent a large part of your message that is unnecessarily searched (easily 95% or more), and can be skipped. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use the quick search function or "Find -> Search Messages" option to look for a piece of text. Actual Results: It returned the wrong matches for the search term. Explained above. Expected Results: Search only text.

Search & filtering are core functionality. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 136055 ***