I run Thunderbird on a shared Samba drive. Because of that, it crashes. I know, it’s not supported. But I want to be able to load the profile from multiple clients - one at a time - and can live with it.
Frustratingly, sometimes it doesn’t crash. That means every time I start Thunderbird, the text in the search bar is the thing I searched for back in 2018. I finally got annoyed enough at that to figure out how to change it.
In the Thunderbird profile is a file called session.json which includes what the last session state was. Inside that is the “quickFilter”, which determines what the filter shows. Mine was:
{"quickFilter":{"filterValues" : {"text" : {"text" : "thing I didn't want to search for anymore", "states" : {"sender" : true, "recipients" : true, "subject" : true, "body" : false}}, "results" : 8}, "visible" : true}} I replaced “thing I didn’t want to search for anymore” with "" and life was good. Incidentally, I usually want to quick filter by sender, recipients, subject but not body - you can set all those with the appropriate booleans.
If you never want to see the quick filter, “visible” : false is your friend.