Solved Searching in mails is totally broken for me

Elgar82

Hi,

I have a few thousands mails in my three imap accounts set up in Vivaldi, and if I want to search something in my mails by typing a word (or a name) in the search bar, results are always unusable and wrong :

no results, even though I have dozens of mails with this word or name
results, some of them with the word searched, but some results don't have the word searched at all

Reindexing my database didn't solve the issue.

I'm always using the latest snapshot.

I have Prefetching enabled.

I have to use Opera Mail when I search something, and it works flawlessly, but I'm tired of switching constantly between Opera and Vivaldi.

Am I the only one with this issue? If searching works perfectly for you guys, any idea how I can solve my issue?

ravionline

The "search" was not working for me too. What stumped me the most was to realize it was broken just for certain mail addresses. Before that I kept on trying with several different keywords as if I wasn't searching right.

Thanks to the pointers here, I ran "Rebuild Mail Search Database" and the problem was fixed. I would have liked some progress notification about the indexing, though.

jumpsq

I did not investigate much, but I reported similar behaviour in VB-86728 (Search very much broken). I don't include the screenshot, but I'll just paste my bug description.

*Steps to reproduce:*
When clicking on contacts (e.g. in the contacts panel or on mail addresses in any mail view), random other mails are displayed among the results, and I also believe that mails are missing. See screenshot for instance - the highlighted mail is some spam in another (offline pop3) account, but it's displayed when pressing on any mail that I've received with my vivaldi account. Also the source of the mails do not mention the respective account name that should be filtered for.

`Rebuild Mail Search Database` does not change it (not sure if it even works, it's not displayed in the status bar).

Searching `from:jumpsq@v... OR to:jumpsq@v...` (deliberately abbreviated on the forums in order not to receive spam) in the example above shows the same results, and this issue happens with basically all contacts (that mails are shown that do not belong to the results).

I have not yet verified whether also mails are missing when they should be shown (but I assume so since for several contacts, no messages are shown), and whether this issue happens only for the sender / receiver addresses or also for the mail contents.

I have first realised that this happens recently, so I would assume that it's a recent issue (or that my mail index has become faulty somehow)

*Expected behaviour:*
Show correct sender / receiver for searches

*Actual behaviour:*
Show random mails (among many correct mails).

Elgar82

@jumpsq I'm glad to see I'm not alone with search feature being broken. Thanks for your reply.

To be honest, which bothers me most is when the search returns zero results, although I can see dozens of mails with the letters I searched.

By the way, I mostly look for letters or words in the body of mails, or in the domain of mail addresses. For example, let's say I work regularly with a company named Apple, I type appl in the search bar, and I should see instantly every mail which has "appl" in its body or in its mail address. That's how it works in Opera, and that's how it used to work in Vivaldi, IIRC. Now, I get zero results, or if I'm lucky I get some results mixed with random other mails.

WildEnte

@Elgar82 have you tried setting up the mail account in a separate profile?

I had at least one mail search bug that was fixed (as I could clearly see in a fresh profile) but in my main profile the bug was always there despite reeindexing and jumping through other hoops. I ended up moving over to the new profile and after some time deleting the old one.

jumpsq

While Rebuild Mail Search Database via clicking on the Mail icon in the status bar did not work, I could now trigger it with context click on All Messages → Advanced → Rerun Filter for Folder.

I really hope that I do not have to re-import my mails to a fresh profile, since several hundred messages are missing from the count even after I've deleted any message-id duplicate. I had invested days into sorting my mails in such a way that I always tried to split them up if any message was missing until each of my offline mails was imported. I'll rather just rely on TB if this should really lead to issues now.

Running mail filters... has been running for 3 hours now, so let's see if it will finish and I will still be able to find any POP3 message.

// No, it does not seem to finish. Oh well.

How about you @Elgar82, am I right assuming that you use some [offline] pop3 account as well?

Elgar82

@wildente said in Searching in mails is totally broken for me:

@Elgar82 have you tried setting up the mail account in a separate profile?

No, how can I do that please?

@jumpsq said in Searching in mails is totally broken for me:

How about you @Elgar82, am I right assuming that you use some [offline] pop3 account as well?

No, as I said in my first post, I use imap accounts. I didn't have to import anything, I just set up the accounts in Vivaldi settings and Vivaldi retrieves all of my mails.

WildEnte

@elgar82 before you try a different profile, double check that you have prefetched your message. To reproduce my (by now fixed) pet bug VB-75874 I used to copy a word from the email I had open directly to the search field, upon which the mail would disappear from the list of search results.

Setting up a user profile takes 5 seconds when you know where to click, great way to test whether a setting or an extension causes an issue. See https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tools/user-profiles/

Elgar82

@wildente Thanks for your help! Yes, mails were prefetched, all of them in fact since prefetching is enabled in Vivaldi mail settings.

Ok, I tried a separate profile and, indeed, search seems to work perfectly now. (I tried with only one mail account, not the three accounts I have on the original profile, if that matters.)

What bothers me is that I use Vivaldi at my office, and if I create a new profile, I lose all my bookmarks and passwords. Is there a way to repair my original profile? Reindexing didn't work, but to do reindexing we only delete the IndexedDB folder. If I delete also the whole Mail folder, would it be like if I created a new profile ?

@wildente said in Searching in mails is totally broken for me:

to test whether a setting or an extension causes an issue

I don't use any extension.

WildEnte

@elgar82 said in Searching in mails is totally broken for me:

What bothers me is that I use Vivaldi at my office, and if I create a new profile, I lose all my bookmarks and passwords. Is there a way to repair my original profile?

I went all the way and moved my profile over because I failed to get mail search to work properly trying to reeindex and delete certain files. I don't remember all the things I have tried, it's been a couple of weeks.

Sadly it is not possible to import bookmarks from one Vivaldi profile to another but you can use Sync to bring your passwords, passwords and some other settings over to the working profile. Mail, web panels and some other settings are not synced, you have to set up your mail accounts and other things from scratch in the new profile. This is actually nice, because it lets you explore some things you would otherwise not try

Steps (off the top of my head):

in your old profile, go to settings - sync and check the "last sync" timestamp. You can also check what data is synced here
Turn off sync on this profile
start the new profile, close the old profile
click on all the default bookmarks so that Vivaldi earns some money. Then, move them to a custom bookmark folder or delete them or whatever, because you want to get your old bookmark setting back, and so the defaults need to go somewhere.
In the new profile, go to settings - sync and turn it on. Enter your Vivaldi login and password, and your master encryption password
wait a bit (due to a bug the other day it took 30 minutes for me the other day, should be much faster now)
you'll notice that your bookmarks will appear. The thumbnails will not sync. For those bookmarks that you keep on your start page, before you reload to get a new thumbnail, visit the site to acknowledge the cookie dialog (which will otherwise show on the bookmark thumbnail...)

ravionline

The "search" was not working for me too. What stumped me the most was to realize it was broken just for certain mail addresses. Before that I kept on trying with several different keywords as if I wasn't searching right.

Thanks to the pointers here, I ran "Rebuild Mail Search Database" and the problem was fixed. I would have liked some progress notification about the indexing, though.

Elgar82

@wildente Thank you for your help, and sorry for my late reply. Finally I totally deleted my Vivaldi installation, and I started again from scratch. Everything works fine for now.