Conversation search behaviors make it completely unusable
Bug Summary
I have a number of what I hope to be bugs to report about Geary's conversation search functionality, but I don't want to clog up the issue tracker by splitting them out:
- Conversation search currently stops trying to search if your term stops finding things if you type too slowly, which is confusing behavior because it makes you think that typing "door asdfghjkl;'" is still bringing up relevant search results. It should instead display "no results" if it doesn't find what it's looking for and update every single time you type a character in the field. This does not currently appear to be the case, though if you type quickly enough it will say "no results."
- Searches never find anything of any relevance whatsoever because they only search inside the email body, which seriously hampers the effectiveness. I typed in "door" to find an email from DoorDash, and only got two emails from Rooms To Go about "door"way delivery and one email from another exchange that says "door" in it. When searching for conversations, people do not want to search inside the email body primarily. We want to find sender names, sender email addresses, and subjects. The fact that conversation search only searches inside the body is very, very odd, especially considering that searching inside the email itself definitely does search through the sender info, subject, etc.
- Even still, it doesn't even search inside the bodies of emails consistently. As a test, I just decided to search "Capital" to find the very latest email in my mailbox from Capital One, which I received yesterday, giving it plenty of time to index. It brings up zero results (since I'm a fast typist), despite there being an email right in front of me from Capital One. Just for giggles, I used the search inside the email. There's so, so many "Capital One" textual references inside of the email body. It makes no sense as to how it could've not found this email.
Your installation
- Geary version: 40.0
- Installation method: RPM from GNOME Software
- Desktop environment: Vanilla GNOME 42
- Operating system and version: Fedora 36
- Email provider: Posteo.net
Steps to reproduce
- Use conversation search to find a sender or subject, or anything useful, really.
- Inevitably fail.
What happened?
Geary cannot find any relevant emails whatsoever when using conversation search due to several bugs and hopefully unintentional behaviors.
What did you expect to happen?
I expect conversation search to search sender names and email addresses, subject lines, and maybe use body search if nothing else is found, but definitely rank those results dead last. I also expect Geary to show "no results" when I type gibberish in the search field, rather than somehow showing me garbage "results" if I type too slowly.
Relevant logs and/or screenshots
Here's an example of what happens if you type the exact same search query but more slowly: