How do you determine indexing stops?

Depending on the size of your email archive it may take a while. I don't think it's configurable whether a folder should be indexed or not.

Good question. I only infer indexing stops by (1) I no longer see any folder indexing listing in the Activity Manager window and (2) running a search query for a word that should appear in virtually all files (e.g. "the") only results in 10 folders and no more. I have been casually tracking using this method for about 36 hours. The 10 folders originally indexed fairly quickly and I saw them in Activity Manager. All together I have a couple dozen folders under Local Folders.

Is there a better way to see indexing progress?

When I right-click on a folder and open Properties, the General Information tab has a check box "Include messages ..." Elsewhere in the forum it was stated this toggles whether the folder is indexed or not. Does it have another purpose?

Is there a better way to see indexing progress?

Yes, via Activity Manager:
Tools (Alt-T) - Activity Manager

Does it have another purpose?

You may be right with this. I never looked at that check box, and I believe it's checked by default when Global Search is enabled. So you'd need to deliberately remove the check mark to exclude a folder from being indexed.

Just in case, you might want to take a look at this article.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search

Appreciate the quick replies. I had reviewed the article but it did not provide answer.

This still leaves me with original problem: The global database indexing is not including all the folders in my Local Folder location. The indexing appears to stop because I do not see any activity in Activity Manager and I never see search results return more than 10 folders. (I have few dozen folders in Local Folder location). What can I do to coax indexing of all my folders?

Did you check with Activity Manager?

I'm having a similar problem. I have an a local folder which contains a bunch of email recently imported from an old Outlook Express setup.

The top-level Inbox folder in this import seems to have indexed fine. Any other low-level folder though does not seem to be indexed.

I find if I click on each individual sub-folder and manually uncheck and re-check the "include messages in this folder in Global Search results" checkbox, it will re-index the folder (as observed in Activity Manager).

After that it seems to search as expected. Bit of a pain to have to go through every folder and do that (at least in my case; there are many folders :)

Install glodaquilla addon. Then a) you can add a column that shows which messages are indexed b) you can more easily determine which folders get indexed

I'm having a similar problem. Common folders seems to be indexed at startup (INBOX, Sent, Drafts...). Other aren't until visited (I mean just click on the folder name). Then you can see indexing working in the activity panel (for big folders only : small one are too fastly indexed and disapear from the history of the activity panel which seem to be the correct behaviour). I've got users with IMAP shared folders (a huge number of folders), and they can't rely on search. I did try with and without subscription -> no success. I did try "repair folder" -> no success.

I'm having a similar problem. Global search misses some messages, so I can't rely on it. That makes it useless for me.

> I'm having a similar problem.

If repair folder has not helped, then install glodaquilla addon. Then add a message list columns for gloda ID and "ondisk". These help you determine which messages are indexed and in some cases why they were not indexed.

If I remember correctly, gloda id: 0 - message not indexed >15 - message is indexed "-1" - message is damaged and cannot be indexed