• I do a lot of non-repeated quick searches
• I don’t know what account/folder the result may be in
• Mostly I do substring searches in the message body

• Anna needs Tuomas to resend her the presentation templates he did during the summer. Tuomas knows he sent all this in a a status mail that he posts on the internal art list.
• Tuomas needs to find a status report he sent two weeks ago on Friday.
• Tuomas needs to find a message containing a password for one of the lists he’s subscribed to. He doesn’t really know *where* this message is. Tuomas has 1 POP and two IMAP accounts.

• Tuomas selects the “art” folder
• T. selects “message body contains” from the rule selection dropdown
• Tuomas types “presentation template” and hits enter
• Tuomas browses the list of results to see in the preview pane if it’s the message he’s looking for and eventually finds it

T. could use the same approach as above, but he can also:

• Select “art” folder
• Use Search>Advanced... menu item or Advanced... dropdown item
• Create a rule “date received is X days ago” or “date received is yy/mm/dd”.

The quicksearch functionality in Evolution doesn’t allow to search outside the cutrrently selected folder. One has to use the vFolder functionality by either creating a new vFolder from scratch or by converting the current quicksearch (on the folder) to vfolder and changing it’s data source to all local and active remote folders:

• T. selects a folder where he *thinks* the message is
• T. selects “message contains” from the quicksearch dropdown and types “list password”.
• In case there are any results, he browses them to see if it contains message he’s looking for. If not,
• T selects Search>Create Virtual Folder from Search... menu item and changes vFolder sources to all local and active remote folders
• T. goes to vFolder>”message contains list password” vFolder and browses the results
• T. find the message and can delete the vFolder since it slows down Evo the next time it starts

Currently it is very uncomfortable to find the right item in the list of things to search in. One needs to toggle the field of interest in a dropdown (subject, recipient...) This list of fields is not particularly short. Not once have I personally selected subject instead of sender, not in subject instead of subject etc. Usually it is not important to be specific in what fields are to be searched, it’s a lot more efficient if we search within all fields (subject, recipient, sender, body, date). The quicksearch function also only works within the active folder. If one needs to do a global search, one has to set-up a vfolder (and usually delete it afterwards).

As it stands, quicksearch only works within the active folder and the only indication that a filter is active on the folder is the text in the search inputbox control. Filters are persistent and changing to a folder will recall the state of the filter.

I believe this behaviour changed, there was a global quicksearch in a sense that it still worked per active folder, but it was active no matter what folder the user selected.

• It is not obvious that a search has been done when a search is currently active.
• It can take a while before a query is finished, there is no indication that something’s happening and the user may think there are no results.

We shouldn’t look at the search interface in the context of Evolution mail application only. Same concepts should work for F-Spot and Rhythmbox and pretty much any application that requires data filtering.

Doing fast searches means not requiring the user to spend a lot of time to precisely specify the query conditions. A flat query similar to google works best. The number of cases when you would would want to do advanced conditions such as searching for a string that appears in a particular header AND NOT elsewhere is minimal. In majority of quick searches I have performed, message contains worked best (: do we need real user testing here?).

To simplify the interface I suggest we drop the search fields in the quicksearch bar and search “message contains” by default. If the user wants to be specific, these queries can still be performed in Search>Advanced....

I have no statistic to back up this. Based only on my personal usage patterns I rarely know what folder a message I’m looking for is. Most of the time I’d like to search on complete mail account source or even all sources. I am not able to define the source in a quick search in Evo. This can only be done for vFolders which by design are useful for repeated queries such as mail received within a week etc.

I suggest putting source selection in place of queried fields in the quicksearch bar, with “current folder” as default because of speed. The quicksearch should be global in the sense that it shouldn’t change depending what folder the user selects.

It needs to be clear that a filter is active. I suggest we move such indicator to the message list, because that is the area of interest. Suggested indicator is a colored border, colored list items or similar.

While the filter is being applied a mini-throbber should indicate this. If technically doable, search as the user types would be nice to help the user be more specific in the query to get to a reasonable message list count.