Seek is based on the concept of faceted browsing. This is when a search is gradually refined by selecting more options, common when shopping on the internet.

Applying this to email, the Seek add-on for Thunderbird makes it easy to narrow down email searches by specifying when the email was received and the sender among other options. This compliments the exisiting search.

Installation is as simple as any other Thunderbird add-on although it is a shame that there is no toolbar icon created for Seek. It can be accessed by pressing Ctrl and K or found in the Tools menu but we would have got started quicker if it was more obvious.

This small blip out of the way, it was very effective and made browsing a large Googlemail account much easier.

There are some things about this addon that we think could do with improvement. It only searches one folder at a time. If you switch to another folder the index has to be recreated, and it is not saved so the whole process has to be repeated when you return to the Inbox. This is less of a problem when emails are not moved to folders. For example it worked very well when accessing a Googlemail account via IMAP.