Related: Critical look at Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird may not be the most user friendly of email/news clients, but
it definetely is the one with most power. However, with power comes complexity and
it is easy to be overwhelmed.
This list is designed to be a repository of advanced tips and tricks that
I or other people come across.
Question: I subscribe to a heavily used newsgroup with hundreds of posts a day. How can I
make my posts stand out so that I can see them quickly?
There are several ways. My favorite way is to slap the 'important' label on my posts
which makes the appear in
red color. Here is how this is done.
- Select your newsgroup in the Folders list
- From the menu select, Tools/Message Filters
- In the dialog box, press the New... button. You'll get another dialog box
- Where it says 'Subject', click the dropdown list and select 'Sender'
- Then go to the last textbox on the same line and enter the name, under which you post messages
- Under 'Perform these actions' subwindow, check 'Label the message' and set whatever label you want. The default is fine as well
- Finally, give the filter a name at the top of the dialog box. Then press OK.
- Close the 'Message Filters' dialog box and you are done
If you want your filter to apply to an entire news server, then select the News server in the first step.
Now all your messages will appear labeled as important (red).
Of course another way is to type your name into the 'Subject or Sender contains' textbox, but then
you won't see anybody else's posts.
Question: I have several thousand messages in my Inbox. I download the messages
from the server and I've read them all, but it still says Inbox (1) in the folders list.
And sure enough, after 5 minutes of scrolling up and down (remember I have thousands of messages), I find
that someone's PC has the wrong date and I got a backdated message. Thunderbird sorts my messages
by date, so it placed the message in the middle of the list, making it difficult to find quickly.
How can I get to such a message quicker.
In your message list, click on the right-most column. You will get a popup menu.
Click on the the 'Read' item. This will add a column to the list that indicates whether
the message has been read or not. Sort by this new column and you'll see the errant message
at the bottom (or top) of the list, making it easy to locate. Then just reset your
default sort to Date.
If you got a really cool trick, send it to the email at the bottom of the page.