Can Icedove's search email function be improved ?

Faced with an inquiry about an item whose name is a common three-letter word combined with
a couple of additional characters, my Icedove search returns nearly a thousand responses,
which is too burdensome to scan visually. Searching on a much longer phrase increased the
number of responses proportionately more, not less.

I tried enclosing the pattern in quotes, but Icedove ignores those, returning the same
thousand responses, nearly every one containing the common three-letter word alone.

Then I navigated to the .icedove application data and did a grep search from the terminal:
grep -B 10 "Saw-09" /home/george/.icedove/REDACTED.08202015/Mail/mail*/* > /home/george/Desktop/Saw-09.txt
which looked through all the mailbox files in about two seconds and returned all the
data that I could hope for, including the inquiry that prompted my search in the first place.
The arguments -A and -B are a big help, although the output organizes the responses by
listing all the first lines of matching emails, then all the second lines, then all the
third lines, and so on.

George Langford