Comment 8 for bug 885542

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5 FirePHP/0.2.1
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.17

I have migrated to Thunderbird from Outlook because Outlook's search feature was too slow. I have imported a database with 2 years worth of emails. Thunderbird's search is faster, but it starts with the *oldest* messages; that means that for full body searches (ex.: body contains: "new ftp password") I have to wait 5+ minutes to get to newer (more relevant) messages.

I know that I can limit the messages to, say, last 100 days or 400 days; however, I usually don't know how many days ago the relevant message was sent. Besides, that is an ugly and non-elegant solution.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get a big email database
2. Start either a simple or advanced search using "body contains".
Actual Results:
The search takes a long time (which is OK given the data size), result list is updated on-the-fly (which is very good), but oldest results appear first (which is undesired).

Expected Results:
The results appear starting from most recent messages.

I am doing a local search, not an IMAP search.

I am marking this bug/feature request as "major", because it makes one of the most used functions (search) unusable in my case.