Faced with an inquiry about an item whose name is a common three-letter word
combined with
a couple of additional characters, my Icedove search returns nearly a
thousand responses,
which is too burdensome to scan visually. Searching on a much longer phrase
increased the
number of responses proportionately more, not less.
I tried enclosing the pattern in quotes, but Icedove ignores those, returning
the same
thousand responses, nearly every one containing the common three-letter word
alone.
Then I navigated to the .icedove application data and did a grep search from
the terminal:
grep -B 10 "Saw-09" /home/george/.icedove/REDACTED.08202015/Mail/mail*/* >
/home/george/Desktop/Saw-09.txt
which looked through all the mailbox files in about two seconds and returned
all the
data that I could hope for, including the inquiry that prompted my search in
the first place.
The arguments -A and -B are a big help, although the output organizes the
responses by
listing all the first lines of matching emails, then all the second lines,
then all the
third lines, and so on.
George Langford
