These filters can be pinned so that they become available in all folders. It can happen that Thunderbird users do not find the emails they are looking for in the active filtered folder. Their options at this point are to either pin the filters and click through the other mail folders or perform a global search in hope of finding the right emails.

Unified Search is a project that tries to combine the functionality of Quick Filters with global searches. The extension in its current state makes it easier to launch a global search from the Quick Filter bar.

The search phrase entered in the Quick Filter bar can be used to initiate a global search in the email client, this is done by pressing Ctrl-Enter in the Quick Filter bar by default.

A new tab listing the global search results is spawned automatically after pressing the keyboard shortcut. That’s handy for users who work with Quick Filter most of the time to find emails and switch to global search if they cannot find the emails this way.

Options are provided to change the shortcut to either Alt-Enter or simply Enter.

unified search

Unified Search is available for all Thunderbird 3 versions, it can be downloaded from the Mozilla Thunderbird website.

Lookout indexes all Microsoft Outlook contents and provides a toolbar to search all emails, news feeds, appointments and attachments. It basically can index all contents of Microsoft Outlook to power the search. Advanced users will like the option to exclude folders from being indexed.

The Microsoft Outlook search add-in Lookout integrates itself nicely into Microsoft Outlook 2003 but needs a small tweak before it will work in Outlook 2007.

cd %SYSTEMROOT%\assembly\GAC
rename Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OLD

To reverse the changes one would issue the command

cd %SYSTEMROOT%\assembly\GAC
rename Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OLD Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook

The options of the Microsoft Outlook search add-on are quite extensive. It is possible to define a time range for the indexing process and to specify how fast new items should be added to the index.

Lookout will automatically index the contents of attachments with the endings txt, doc, html, htm, xls and ppt. My Document folders can be added to the search as well as additional files, folders and Microsoft Outlook folders.

Lookout is a fast lightweight Microsoft Outlook search add-in that’s way faster than other solutions like Google’s Desktop Search tool.