Quick filters have almost completely replaced search for me.

While that does speak to the strength of TB’s Quick filters it’s also an indictment of its search

That we can search at all is nearly a miracle given the old and bad infra. At least they work hard (I hope) on replacing the old system with a real database. That should enable the conversation view (Gmail-like), too!

How would that look like and how does it differ from the conversation view Thunderbird already has?

The current "conversation view" is misnomer. There really is nothing like that. Again, just think of Gmail and how it's handled there. This is how it would look like, e.g. you actually see your own response, too. Currently this is impossible because Thunderbird does not actually know what messages belong together. It just applies some ugly hacks to even find the ingoing emails. It's a trainwreck, but I believe it will get better and we will finally have some decent mail software out there.

> just think of Gmail

>> How would that look like?

I wouldn't describe it as a hack, it uses the references in the messages themselves, as long as they are accurate it will work perfectly. This is the same way, Thunderbird knows if you have replied/forwarded messages.

> you actually see your own response

I do see the response, why wouldn't I that's what the feature is for. Not sure if there is a bug for you.

It's not my words. There is a 1.5 hour long video of a maintainer chat uploaded to their YouTube channel a while ago. There one dev explains it very carefully and in depth – "ugly hack" is their words, not mine! Seems a lot of work to untangle that mess. They are already a long time over their estimates of how long it would take.

Not sure what you mean by that you see your own response. In the current "conversation" (thread) view the chain will only display incoming answers, but never your own outgoing emails – which well... would make it a true conversation view.

Fair enough, the implementation can be messy, which I know nothing about, while input and output data can still be clean and well defined.

It absolutely displays outgoing mails, that's what I was saying. It hasn't ocurred to me that it potentially couldn't, then it would be kind of worthless. Not sure why you have this bug, but that isn't normal, maybe you can report it?

Mh, yeah. You are right. It's flaky tho for me... Sometimes it displays my own messages, sometimes not. I won't open a bug for that right now. I just keep my fingers crossed we get the better implementation.

What is still missing now (even if or when it works), is a continous display for me. Currently you have to go email by email, which can be a bit cumbersome to navigate, because then you'll never get the "full picture" for a quick glance, if you get my drift.

> continous display

Yes that might be useful. I do generally have the whole history in every message since it is added automatically, when replying so you can reply inline. Maybe some client don't do that though.