When using "Entire Message" option in search pulldown, Thunderbird returns all messages. Given search terms are ignored. Searching by "subject" or "sender" is fine.

It does not work for me on an NNTP server. It works fine on an IMAP server or in local folders.

NNTP doesn't support body search, so there's not much we can do (other than disabling that option for newsgroups) or searching the offline store, if you have the newsgroup configured for offline use.

Hmmmmm. Pine seems to do it. Is it just downloading every message and searching locally? It takes long enough that that is what I have always suspected.

that's another option, but what happens if you have a 10,000 message newsgroup? There was an NNTP extension that allowed search of message bodies, but afaik, the Netscape news server was the only one that implemented it, so it never went anywhere.

Well, a quick test indicates that Pine seems to deal with a text search in a 2600-message newsgroup off a server on the LAN fine. It did take about 30 seconds for the search though. I understand the reasons why this feature is not implemented, but it is in other newsreaders and I feel that it would be useful here as well. The presence of a non-working "Entire Message" option is a bug, even if you don't want to implement the functionality.

Actually it does not work for me when searching messages on an IMAP server, which was what the bug was originally about. Any ideas regarding that issue? Thanks

It WORKSFORME on IMAP. Perhaps your server does not support search? Try using some other IMAP client that supports search on the same server and see if it works.

It works when using Microsoft Outlook Express as my imap client...

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 83971 ***

I think I have unintentionally hijacked this bug which has now resulted in it being declared a duplicate. The original reporter didn't say it was an IMAP problem originally but eventually clarified in comment #6. OTOH, regarding the complaint of the original reporter, it WORKSFORME.

Reopening as the problem I am facing is not a duplicate of bug 83971.

removing CC

Duping to the correct bug. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 67421 ***

Not sure how much 67421 is a duplicate of this bug. It looks like 67421 is about filters, whereas this bug is about search. I don't know about how thunderbird is implemented, maybe the root cause of both problems is the same. Just want to be clear about the difference...