Quick Filter for Thunderbird Now Built in...
The Quick Filter was our first feature born purely as an add-on. It has since graduated from life as an add-on and currently lives on inside the Thunderbird 3.1 release.
Search and Filtering
Thunderbird 3.0 boasted a brand new search system, which made it possible to find messages in any email account or folder. The new search, while extensive and complete, could sometimes be slow and lack context.
The new search answered the question: “Where is that message?” when a message could be anywhere but what it didn’t answer was a question like, “Quickly find me the unread messages from Susan in this folder”.
A Look back at Quick Search
After we released Thunderbird 3.0 we re-examined an older feature Thunderbird 2 called “Quick Search”.
Quick Search was a fast but somewhat opaque feature which allows people to find messages within the current folder. We did our homework and talked to the people who loved that feature, so as to understand why they loved this feature, and decided to make it easier to use for everyone.
From our research we summed up the worthwhile aspects of the old Quick Search interface as speed, local folder context, and responsive feedback. Its original design had, however, become complicated after an accumulation of small changes over the years.
Here’s a quick list of some of the changes that resulted from the evolution of Quick Search into the Quick Filter interface we have today.
Free Form Text Search
As you can see the old Quick Search from Thunderbird 2 had options for searching by type, Subject, Sender, Subject or Sender, etc.
These search types were hidden in a drop down menu accessible from the search icon — something which is both hard to discover, and caused many problems as users would, say, set a search type to be “To or Cc” and then hours later be puzzled at failing searches when trying to search for an email subject – because the search type was “sticky” and was still set to “To or Cc”.
In the new Quick Filter we improved on the search type switching. Instead of hiding the options box in a menu we presented the filter types as a new row when the user first starts typing their search.
You can also see in this screen shot that we added an upfront results count which helps you know that you are filtering messages and how many messages match your current filter.
Quick and Common Filters
Another item learned from our research was that people wanted to quickly filter by a number of things that weren’t easily expressed with text. Here’s a list of common search filters we created.
- Unread
- Starred
- Contacts
- Tagged
- Attachments
In fact, these types have been available since Thunderbird 2, but only in a deeply hidden menu, and on a not-enabled-by-default toolbar button. This new interface made it possible for us to surface existing features so that they were more easily discovered.
Combining Filters
In another step beyond the original Quick Search we implemented combining of different search filters in the Quick Filter interface.
If you’re searching for messages that are both “starred” and have attachments, your Quick Filter bar would look like this:
You can combine any of the other Quick Filter criteria into a search. A subject text search for starred messages with attachments is easy to do and will most likely let you find that message you’re looking for.
When you’re filtering for tagged messages we went beyond the regular filters to provide tagged filtering which shows you which tags are used by the messages currently in the list:
Pinned Searching
Finally, a long standing request for the old Quick Search was to be able to easily apply the search as you browse to different folders. This was a confusing system to implement on the Quick Search because there wasn’t good feedback for when a search was being applied to the current folder.
The Quick Filter bar looks like this if you’ve pinned the unread filter, letting you jump from folder to folder looking only at unread messages.
Further Feedback
Please download the latest Thunderbird if you would like to try this out, Quick Filter is no longer an add-on which can be downloaded.
While Quick Filter is finished as an add-on you’re welcome to continue providing further feedback on it. Just go to the Thunderbird Get Satisfaction site and see if you question, idea, or comment has already been raised.
Release notes
This add-on had several iterations and landed into Thunderbird core for the Thunderbird 3.1 release. If you’re looking for Quick Search install the latest Thunderbird and it will be available by default.
Graduated on:
June 24th 2010
Go there...
http://mozillalabs.com/messaging/quick-filter/
Don
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