I recently upgraded from ubuntu-10.04 to ubuntu-12.04 which went well except for the upgrade to kmail2, which was extremely arduous. I have been a faithful kmail user for 10 years, and this last update has tested my devotion. I would be willing to pay money to prevent such a painful and time-consuming migration in the future.

kontact -v
Qt: 4.8.1
KDE Development Platform: 4.8.5 (4.8.5)
Kontact: 4.8.5

I was finally able to reimport all my mail and get kmail2 to be mostly functional. Nevertheless, I am still unable to use the 'Find Messages' feature to search for mail. I have gone to 'System Settings > Desktop Search' and ensured that 'Enable Nepomuk Semantic Desktop' and 'Enable Email Indexer' are both checked. I did not enable 'Nepomuk File Indexer' because I do not want to index all the files on my computer. My understanding is that this should be sufficient to have nepomuk index kmail mail. Is this correct?

I also went to a test folder, made sure that 'Folder Properties > Maintenance > Enable Full Text Indexing' is checked. I right-clicked on the folder and selected 'Update Folder' which I understand should force re-indexing of the folder.

I than performed a simple 'Find Messages' search trying to match a simple string in the Subject of the email. The 'Find Messages' dialog returns without errors, but no messages are returned, though there are various emails inside the folder with a Subject that matches the search criteria.

I have read various messages on this forum that report problems with 'Find Messages' but they are either for older versions of KDE/Kontact, or the symptoms/solutions described do not apply/work for me.

Should 'Find Messages' be working on Kontact 4.8.5? What can I do to troubleshoot this issue?

Thank you

> I than performed a simple 'Find Messages' search trying to match a simple string in the Subject of the email.

I don't really use the Find Messages feature, but I have a quick solution for this. Just go to the folder—that is, make sure its contents are visible in the list of emails and type the search query into the search bar at the top of the list. I've searched by subject and by sender and it works like a normal filter.

I am now on 4.9.x, I avoided 4.8 due to various issues. However Search does work but is a bit finicky. I always tick "any of" instead of "all of" and normally get results. Try search on "action items" and I get all my Spam mail??

You may need to disable indexing for your spam mail folder (right click on it -> Folder Properties).

Thank you karthikp. I had not thought about using the 'Search' / filter input box at the top of the list of messages. It does not make it possible to perform advance searches, but it's better than nothing.