So, the 20th Sept 2009 build for Thunderbird enabled Faceted search, by default. Quite nice. However, when you have nearly 17 GB of email- it can take a long long time to actually build the sqlite index's it needs to carry out this sort of search.
Late last night, my shreader installer updated to Gecko/20090910 build, and since then ( about 18 hrs back ) its been building the index. Which is itself upto 2 GB now. Lets see when it finishes. Although, to be honest I dont really care that much about a few gigs worth of data. Disk isnt that hard to come by and email is relatively important in the things that one uses on a day to day basis. The thing that concerns me is how and what the performance of something like this might end up being. A few initial peeps, and it looks and works great. However, will it still stay this cool with a many-gig index ?
Having said that - let there be no doubt about it : This is a *great* feature. Just the sort of thing that makes Thunderbird stand out miles from the other email clients out there. And having had it for just a few hours today, and even with a partial index - its already helping me get more productive and resolve / identify relevant threads faster!
There are some more details here : http://www.visophyte.org/blog/2009/09/03/sos-your-facet-faceted-global-search-for-mozilla-thunderbird/ and if you want to look at specifics of what faceted search is, look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_search
- KB
How can I get the rpm's of the latest TBird?
What's wrong with http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/ ? 
Indexed email search would be a big step towards my adoption of ThunderBird. It already has superior IMAP support compared to Outlook. Scalability is a concern, but for local e-mails you really don't need that many e-mails on hand. Move your old e-mails to Gmail and search old e-mails through their web search. I have all my e-mails from 2000 to 2008 on Gmail, and just keep 30 days locally. 
HI,
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