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Imagine you read a mail from "Dr. Foo Bar".

Now you want to see all mails send from or to him.

How do you do this?

I only know the complicated way:

  • Ctrlshiftf search for mails in "from" (with annoying typing the mail address again)
  • Ctrlshiftf search for mails in "to"

Why is there not such an entry in the context menu of the mail sender?

Is there no easy to use way to jump from reading a mail from "Dr Foo Bar" to a list of all messages from/to him?

Update

Mails can be stored in different folders. Solutions which only work for one folder won't help me.

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To search all emails in all folders, sent to or from a particular email address:

  1. Right click on an email address and select "Copy Email Address"
  2. Right click on the [Search... <Ctrl+K>] box search box location select Paste, then Enter or just type CtrlK, CtrlV, and Enter

However, you might not like Thunderbird's default search results view.

Location of "Open email as list"

If you prefer the view when you click on "Open email as list", shown below

List view

then the best solution is to install a Thunderbird plugin, which will make this the default.

  1. From the menu select Tools > Add-ons
  2. Type "search as" into the search box
  3. Click the install button next to Search as list 3.0
  4. Restart Thunderbird
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  • In my preferences the global search was disabled. I enabled it now. It seems that this just works for mails which are indexed by thunderbird. I guess your solution works after thunderbird has indexed my folders. – guettli Aug 17 '15 at 6:09
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I don't think there's an easy way to see both send from and to in a single window.

But you can easily sort by sender from your inbox view, just select an email from that person and click on the From header:

enter image description here

You can do the same in your "Sent" folder too.

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  • 1
    +1 ... I had the same idea. Also you can simply type sender's name for example I typed Launchpad and it showed all emails I got from Launchpad. – JoKeR Jul 2 '15 at 15:48
  • Mails can be stored in different folders. Solutions which only work for one folder won't help me. I guess your solution only works if all mails are in one folder. Or am I missing something? – guettli Jul 2 '15 at 15:50
  • @guettli Such queries are AFAIK only possible through the "search messages" window where you can ask to search in subfolders. – Sylvain Pineau Jul 2 '15 at 15:56
  • @SylvainPineau who is responsible for fixing usability problems like this? – guettli Jul 2 '15 at 16:01
  • @guettli www-archive.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/bugs – Sylvain Pineau Jul 2 '15 at 16:04
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You might consider the quicker quicksearch add-on. It allows you to right-click on a message in the message list and immediately do a search in the quick search box for that sender's email address or domain. There are some things to note:

  • The Ctrl-Alt-H keyboard shortcut doesn't work in some versions of Thunderbird.
  • It includes the display name in the search, not just the email address.
  • The domain search parses the address poorly, so you may end up with example.com> in the search box.
  • You can't right-click on the sender address in the message panel; only right-clicking in the message list works.

That said, it does this one job pretty well in my experience.

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