Thanks to the efforts of Makoto Kato (jp-blog en-blog twitter) whom you may remember as the bringer of CJK bi-gram tokenization, I have just pushed tokenizer support for case-folding, accent-folding, and voiced sound mark magic to comm-central. The net result is that searches for “ĝLȬdÅ” will now find “gloda” and vice versa. Less crazy searches should also be improved.
Starting tomorrow, Thunderbird (in the guise of Lanikai) 3.1 nightlies will have this capability and it will also show up in the next beta (beta 2). No action on your part is required; when you start running a build with this capability your existing gloda database will get blown away and indexing will start from scratch. If you go back to an older version for some reason after having used the updated build, the old build will also decide to blow away your database, so try to avoid making a habit of switching between them.
We also have some significant performance enhancements related to gloda search and indexing slated for beta 2, not to mention* usability enhancements to avoid the dreaded gloda search/quick search toggle dance.
* This expression is weird given that I go on to mention the allegedly unmentioned, but it still makes more sense than “all but X”.