Organising emails with Thunderbird

It can be hard to keep the clutter down in an email inbox, especially if you sign up to newsletters. There are lots of tools in Thunderbird to help stay on top of emails that can enable you to sort the inbox, assign tags to emails or even move them into folders.

The inbox is normally sorted by date. You can tell that this is the case by looking at the column headings in the inbox. The arrow in the Date column shows that this is the sort criterion. Click on a column heading to sort by that column. The arrow also shows which direction emails are sorted by a-z or z-a, for example.

Sorting doesn't help differentiate between emails from the same person, so tagging is also a helpful tool. Left-click on an email and then on the tag button in the toolbar. A menu will appear with a selection of tags. It also colour-codes the text of the email. It is possible to add more than one tag but it will always take the colour of the first tag.

Emails can be sorted by tags as well if the tag column is visible. To do this, click on the small button to the right of the column headings and then on the Tag.

The best way to keep an inbox productive is to keep as few emails in it as possible and to move emails out of it as soon as possible. Right-click on the inbox and then left-click on New Folder. Give the folder a name and leave the bottom option.

To move an email, left-click on it and, without releasing the button, move it over the folder. Let go of the button to move the email. You can move several emails at the same time. Click on the first email, hold down shift, click on the last email and then drag them into the folder.

Finally, you can search emails by either the subject or the sender by clicking in the Search box at the top of the Thunderbird window. As you type, Thunderbird updates the results so it is not always necessary to type the whole word.