Five Power Tips for Thunderbird
As an internet professional, I use e-mail constantly. Mutt, a popular e-mail client for command line geeks had been wearing on me. I found Thunderbird 1.5 a capable replacement for my needs, and have since cut the average size of my Inbox in half.
Here are five tips I use to get the most productivity out of Thunderbird.
1. Use Filtering
When it comes down to why I decided pursue alternatives it came down to one feature: Easier filtering. I got too many “action alerts” in my Inbox. Although the sender may advocate that I should Save the Environment today, In my organizational scheme I’d really prefer to save their critical message in another folder, and save the environment tomorrow.
Create a “bulk” folder as alternate inbox for impersonal mail you don’t need to see immediately. Then the next time you get an alert that your donation is needed immediately, right click the e-mail address that the message is from. You’ll find an option to create a filter based on that address. Easy.
Tip two further extends the power of easy filtering.
2. Use Labels
Thunderbird 1.5 allows you to label a message with one of five labels, and each label changes the color of the title in your Inbox, adding a visual cue. By default the labels are: Important, Work, Personal, To Do, and Later.
Quickly label a message using the keys 1 through 5 on the keyboard, or 0 to “unlabel” a message. Learning which key goes with which label will quickly pay off.
For maximum benefit, combine the use of labels with the with the custom views that Thunderbird lets you create. I created a View created called “Work”, which expresses “Show me all the messages that are Unread, or labeled as Important, To Do or Work”. These tend to be the critical things I need to give attention to, and narrows what I see in my Inbox from over 100 messages to about 10.
Further automate the benefit of labels by combining them with the filter feature. Create filters to mark messages from particular senders as “Personal” to further reduce distraction at work.
As icing, Thunderbird lets you combine a custom view with search terms to further narrow the display of what’s shown. I can select the custom Work view, and then search within that for ones from Chris.
Thunderbird 2.0 will provider further enhance support for labels.
3. Install Keyboard-friendly extensions
It is nearly always faster to accomplish a computer task using only the keyboard, if good shortcuts are available. Try this first extension and I think you’ll agree!
-
Nostalgy adds two critical shortcuts that allow you to move or save to a folder by typing parting of the name. As you type, it shows you all possible matching folder names. This can be much faster than using Drag-N-Drop with the keyboard. It also reduces the need to keep the folder pane visible all the time. After contacting the author, an additional helpful feature was addeded for the 0.1.5. release. Now “l” toggles if the folder list is hidden or shown. See the “About” screen for the full shortcut list.
- The External Editor Extension allows you to do more complex formatting using a text editor. I use the following syntax to launch the Vim editor in a terminal, which is faster than loading the graphical Gvim:
/usr/bin/konsole --noframe --nomenubar --noscrollbar --notabbar --vt_sz=90x40 -e /bin/vim -e /bin/vim
If you don’t currently use a text editor, consider Bram Moolenaar’s Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing as an introduction.
- The Headers Toggle extension adds a single useful shortcut totoggle viewing the full message headers. Use it when you get bcc’ed on a message and want to check which address of yours the the mail was actually delivered to.
- Finally, the Display Mail User Agent is mostly for fun, recommended to make e-mail a tad more personal. It displays an icon the message for the e-mail program (or “user agent”) that the sender is using. This tells you a little bit about about the person at a glance. Like e-mail address itself, it provides a hint about the person you are dealing with.
4. Master Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts to use in Thunderbird’s message composition window were not easily found now from Googling. Remembering just a few of these commands is a faster alternative to loading an external editor, if they are all you need. The following provides quick and intuitive ways to move around the message window, possibly selecting text to cut or delete in the process.
| Thunderbird Message Composition shortcuts | |
|---|---|
| Shift | Begin a selection |
| End | Go to the end of the line |
| Home | Go to the beginning of the line |
| Ctrl-End | Go to the end of the message |
| Ctrl-Home | Go to the beginning of the message |
| Ctrl -> | to forward a word |
| Ctrl <- | to backwards a word |
| PageDown | Go down a page |
| PageUp | Go down a page |
A typical flow is to quickly highlight everything below the current point and delete it, to get rid of old message context that’s no longer needed.
Here’s another keyboard-based workflow that’s very handy. It allows you to quickly take action on a group of messages:
- Notice a lot of automated messages with the word “warning” in them.
- Control-K to search for “warning”
- Tab to move to message index
- Control-A to select all messages
- Del to delete them all
- Control-K to return to search box
- Del to clear the search box
- Tab to return the message index
A quick test of my own revealed it was was about 33% faster to use only they keyboard than to also use the mouse. (About 12 seconds versus 18). Stacking up these micro-efficiencies throughout a workday full of e-mail makes a noticeable difference. I find I’m less frustrated with my tools when they help me to complete a task nearly as fast as I can think it through!
Mozilla has a helpful, if incomplete, reference of other possible keyboard shortcuts for Thunderbird.
5. Solve the Desktop / Laptop synchronization problem
I store my mail in IMAP folders on a central IMAP server, so I can easily access it from home or work. However, I wanted a complete synchronization, including the address book, preferences and extensions.
Without this, there would be at least slight differences between the two contexts, and those differences would drive me nuts. Because it would look 98% percent the same, it would be difficult to remember which change existed where. Changing everything in two places would be a drag.
Enter Unison, a file synchronizer that works on Linux, Mac and Windows. Unison is a possible solution for me because my work machine stays on continuously and is accessible via SSH. If you one of machines is not available like this, consider Portable Thunderbird instead.
I use this relatively simple unison profile to tell it to synchronize my “.thunderbird” folder, except for IMAP cache folders, which I know I don’t need because the mail is stored on a central server:
# The contents of ~/.unison/thunderbird.prf root = /home/mark/.thunderbird/ root = ssh:mark@my.workmachine.comhome/mark/.thunderbird ignore = Name ImapMail
There is only one “gotcha” about this. Filtering rules are stored in the ImapMail folder, in a file named “msgFilterRules.dat”. That can be solved that by moving the file out of the ImapMail folder, and replacing it with a symbolic link to the moved file. This way, the file still gets synchronized because it’s outside the ImapMail folder, but Thunderbird can still find it through the symbolic link which has been created in the folder on both machines.
When I come home from work, I run Unison to sychronize any changes from work. Then before I return to work, I run unison again to sync my change from laptop to my work desktop again. Although Unison runs a typical graphical application, the fastest way to sync is run it on command-line in batch mode:
unison -batch -ui=text thunderbird
That saves the time of loading the graphical interface, as well as skipping the confirmation
step and starting immediately.
If I forget to sychronize once, nothing explodes. I can still get all e-mail from other the location because IMAP is still the primary synchronization tool . At some points I have made different changes to in both places before I sync again. Unison will ask what to do if it’s not sure which file is authoritative in this case. In these cases I have always had success in choosing all the files from one copy or another to be authorizative. That seems most likely to produce a consistent state.
It may be necessary to use different outgoing mail servers for home and work. To reduce spam, mail servers often only accept mail from their own networks. To address this, install the SmtpSelect extension. It provides a “Select SMTP” button which you can add to the toolbar. Now, switching outgoing mail servers is just a click away.
In Conclusion
I started this project skeptical that any graphical e-mail program could rival Mutt for performance and efficiency, not to mention the simplicity of accessing it anywhere through a text-based console.
While my setup with Thunderbird is more complex, it offers a number of new workflow improvements, especially easier filtering and labels. Thunderbird is an excellent e-mail program that new users can learn easily, and power-users may be surprised they appreciate.
Updates
July 29th, 2006 - I changed the recommended external editor from Xterm to Konsole. Copy/Paste in Xterm is broken because it doesn’t allow you to paste the “normal” clipboard, only the selection. Gnome-terminal 2.10 won’t work because this syntax wasn’t supported: gnome-terminal -e vim file.txt. However gnome-terminal has a more sensible paste shortcut– “Contrl-Shift V”, so I updated Konsole to use the that shortcut, too.
26 Responses to “Five Power Tips for Thunderbird”
The opinions expressed by individuals posting in the Summersault Blog are not necessarily those of Summersault, LLC. While we try to insure the quality and accuracy of the information presented here, we make no guarantees about its suitability for any particular purpose.
July 22nd, 2006 at 5:54 am
I currently use Apple Mail with multiple IMAP accounts. Overall I really like it - streamlined UI, good search-as-you-type across multiple folders, a few other very nice enhancements.
That said, there are some issues. IMAP support is somewhat slow in large mailboxes, I have to accept SSL certificates every time I launch the app, and the filters file periodically gets corrupted causing duplicates of the last day’s worth of mail to appear in my inbox.
Like you I’m a keyboard junkie, and appreciate the article’s details on how to use Thunderbird more effectively. I’ve tried Thunderbird a few times and given up because of the lack of one or two key features. In particular there’s a plug-in called MailActOn (http://indev.ca) that allows you to set up keyboard-triggered mail filters. So after examining a message I can hit a keystroke and have it sorted to the appropriate folder. 90% of the time I use this as a sort of “Put Away” command: I have one main keystroke for multiple rules, and depending on which rule is matched the message goes to the right place. I don’t even have to think about which rule I want to invoke or which folder I need to send the message to.
Is there anything like this for Thunderbird?
July 22nd, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Dave,
I haven’t run across something like that yet. It’s fairly easy to archive with the Nostalgy extension already. Just “s” for “Save” and then type a few unique characters of the folder to save to. By being intentional about uniqueness for key folders, this could be just another character or two to type
As part of the switch, I’ve also been experimenting with using one large “archive” folder instead of many specific folders. I got the idea of using less folders from Jeff Veen, who advocates that searching is good substitute for sorting these days. However, it won’t be perfect until Thunderbird has better tagging support, which is coming, because sometimes the word I would think to search for just isn’t in the message to start with.
July 23rd, 2006 at 7:41 am
[...] Mark Stosberg has posted a list of five power tips for serious Thunderbird users. [...]
July 23rd, 2006 at 11:40 am
I’ve been flip-flopping between Thunderbird and Mail.app every couple of months as I change my mind about how to organize and work with my email. Using IMAP, each one has different strengths and weaknesses that will determine which kind of setup will work better.
Thunderbird seems to handle organization via folders a bit better than Mail.app (mostly because it supports subscribing/unsubscribing from folders in your IMAP hierarchy). However, Thunderbird has limited support for tagging/IMAP keywords, with only the 5 available labels, and online search folders are a bit broken when searching on labels or certain headers (both planned to be fixed for TB 2.0). While using TB, I found that if I wasn’t constantly making sure that I had filters and folders set up for messages, I wouldn’t have a good handle on what was coming in that needed action.
Mail.app needs some work supporting some of the more advanced IMAP functionality, like the above mentioned folder subscriptions, IDLE support (for email notification from the server rather than polling from the client), and IMAP keywords. However, its saved search equivalent seems to work a bit better when searching online folders. MailActOn provides good keyboard support for moving, marking and otherwise managing emails coming into the Inbox, and MailTags provides better tagging support. MailTags currently only stores its tagging info in Mail.app’s local cache, but the next version will support using IMAP keywords for server-side tagging. The two plug-ins together seem to provide a very effective method for tagging, searching and taking action on mail both as it comes in and as you read through it, which I’m currently testing. The one downside is that the MailTags data won’t follow you from client to client until the next version.
July 24th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
[...] Mark Stosberg gives Five Power Tips for Thunderbird. [...]
July 25th, 2006 at 7:53 am
Mouse Gestures speed things up easily. Click and drag…
up (new message)
right (next message)
left (previous message)
…etc.
So in just a couple of seconds, with a couple of movements of the mouse anywhere in the big, fat message window, you can do most actions excluding typing the message.
And the most useful keyboard shortcut: ctrl-return to send.
July 31st, 2006 at 1:48 am
Mark,
Good tips here. I’ve enjoyed Firefox for awhile, and was inspired this afternoon to download Thunderbird, and it’s a whole new world–in the good sense. I’ve got the first two tips down. I’ll be back later to pick up the rest of your wisdom. Thanks for the presentation today.
July 31st, 2006 at 10:54 am
I use Thunderbird and love it. If you do use Thunderbird with POP3 (I do), make sure you search Google for the MozBackup tool which was exclusively designed to backup and restore Thunderbird mail. (Saved me a few times!)
Thunderbird also allowed my to import .mbox files saving my neck when I had to recover email from an old IMAP host via ftp!
July 31st, 2006 at 12:28 pm
Oh well. I’ve gone back to Apple Mail. I knew there was a reason I’d given up on Thunderbird in the past…if anyone has ways around these I’d love to hear it.
Nostalgy is pretty cool, and in fact I’d love to know if there’s anything equivalent for Apple Mail in cases where MailActOn doesn’t work for me. But:
- I have three email accounts: one for personal mail, one for business mail, and one for bulk mail. I suppose this isn’t strictly necessary; I originally did it for situations where I might want to check one but not the others, and to keep my business and private correspondence somewhat separate. Anyway, Apple provides me with a nice combined Inbox so day to day I don’t have to worry about the separate accounts. I can do something similar with Thunderbird’s Saved Searches, but (a) it’s not selected when I launch Thunderbird, (b) it doesn’t seem to refresh itself as new mail comes in, and most importantly (c) it won’t work with a threaded display.
- MailActOn requires that I know less about a message. For bulk mailing lists, I often look at a subject line, decide I’m not interested, and file away the whole thread without knowing for sure which list it came from. With MailActOn that knowledge is handled by the computer.
All this makes me sad, honestly. Thunderbird seems faster and, overall, more keyboard-friendly than Apple Mail. Any advice is, of course, appreciated.
August 31st, 2006 at 9:50 pm
To Dave Feldman:
I thought that in the current version of Thunderbird you could create multiple pop accounts (e.g., one for each of your mail addresses) and have them all deliver to your single “global inbox”. Does this not fill your need?
I’m not sure I understand what you are after in your second point.
I have a problem with TB though where I’d be interested in comments. I am currently trying to move away from google mail (gmail) — two days “unexpected maintenance” on my account shutting it down with no response from “support” — and hence copying all my 300MB of messages to a different account. The only way of doing this is by POP3. gmail however restricts the messages sent to batches which were a few hundred at the start but now have been reduced to a few tens — horrible, I’ll still be copying my messages in 5 years from now. In theory, by setting the TB server properties to check email every minute, it should still keep loading new messages. Oddly, it doesn’t. When I request “Get Mail” manually, all works. How can I force continued pop download?
Best wishes,
David.
September 1st, 2006 at 5:12 pm
I’m the author of Nostalgy. You might be interested to give a try to the next release under
preparation:
http://www.eleves.ens.fr/home/frisch/soft_mozilla.html
Amongst other productivity improvements, the new release features a rule system to associate default target folder to e-mails according to their headers and to allow one-key move/copy to the default folder. This seems similar to what Dave suggests in his first comment.
September 5th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Here is how I quickly store messages. First, I don’t sort anymore, I search (I’ve been doing that for some years now and it’s really effective - I’m also pretty happy that gmail is going in that direction too). For very quickly storing messages, I just hit one button and it automatically stores my message(s) in the “Archive” folder I previously created.
For this, I installed a very useful extension called “Buttons” (https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/106/). Go to the extension preferences, hit the “Archive” tab, select your “Archive” folder, add it, then set it as the default. Next, go in your message list window control-click or right-click right to the existing buttons, customize and drop the “archive button” on the pane. That’s it. (I also did this in the message detail window).
Now when I read a message and there is nothing more to do with it, I just click on “Archive” and it’s stored in my “Archive folder”.
A bit of setup, but try it. It’s really fast in the day to day operations. Cheers
September 18th, 2006 at 9:18 am
D Kreil:
(1) It does look like Thunderbird supports a global inbox, but only for POP accounts. I keep much of my mail on the server using IMAP. (Part of the reason I’m looking at Mail alternatives is that Mail seems to slow down with a lot of server-side mail.)
(2) To clarify: Nostagly (before the latest version, apparently) is based on folders; MailActOn is based on filters. You can assign a key to multiple filters, and MailActOn will run the first that applies. So it allows for a deferred version of regular mail filters. When my mail first arrives, it gets sorted into various folders based on criteria I’ve set up. Similarly, when I hit my magic “put away” key with MailActOn, the selected message is sorted into a folder using message-based criteria. Does that make more sense?
Alain Frisch:
Thanks! I’ll check it out. Now if I could just get a global IMAP inbox view, it might be enough to switch…
September 27th, 2006 at 8:09 am
I’ve been trying to get Thunderbird working using IMAP for a small customer service department of about 6 people. I am having synchronization problems that I cannot find a solution to. The group is using the Label feature to mark each email for the appropriate service rep. The colors are not applied to the server until “gatekeeper” either switches to a different folder AND there is new mail, or she quits the Thunderbird and starts again. The latter “solution” is hardly very efficient. Similarly if one of the other team members needs to re-label a message the synchronization does not always occur.
As well, I believe that IMAP does not actually have a “move” command. When archiving messages from the Inbox it would appear that the message is copied and then later deleted. But, sometimes the delete does not work once again due to the interaction of the other team members. Messages will re-appear back into the inbox causing a lot of confusion.
Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
TIA,
Brian
September 27th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Brian,
What IMAP server and version are you using? It could be more of an issue with that than Thunderbird. Are people connecting to the same folders at the same time from different computers? If so, did you set up special “shared” folders according to your IMAP server documentation? For example, from the Courier IMAP documentation, you can see some of the details about shared folders, including how they need some extra steps to set up: http://www.inter7.com/courierimap/README.sharedfolders.html
September 28th, 2006 at 4:14 am
Mark,
The IMAP mail server is the native application installed on Apple’s Mac. OS and all applications are definitely up-to-date. Beyond that I have no information on the version. Running imapd shows: IMAP4 rev1 2004.357. I assume this is the Cyrus server but that is only a guess. The IMAP service was activated using Cutedge Systems’ MailServe v2.1.6.
Yes, people are connecting to the same folders simultaneously. Particularly the inbox. The gatekeeper could move messages to each individual’s own folder but this isn’t working well either. As well, there is the coordination problem that needs to be dealt with. Using labels is the best approach, so everyone ends up sitting in the inbox. Switching to another folder and coming back will definitely allow a synchronization the first time it is done. After that unless the alternate folder has changed no label updates are reflected back to the server.
I have not set up any special “shared” folders beyond what Thunderbird itself added. I can find nothing in the documentation concerning any special steps I would need to take. I’m still digging through it though. The Apple system is pretty much “switch it on and it just works”.
I doubt however that this is the problem. When a server synchronization does get triggered everything works properly. Trouble is it’s a hit and miss affair. Switching from one folder to another may or may not work. What Thunderbird could use is an “ET call home” button to force the server update.
Brian
September 28th, 2006 at 9:29 am
Brian,
It does look like Mac OS X uses Cyrus. And it also looks like there are recommended special steps to implement “shared folders” with it. That documentation is here:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mimap/chapter/ch09.html#91630
This continues to seem like a worthwhile avenue to pursue.
Mark
September 29th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Brian,
It also struck me that a formal request tracking system might be a good solution the department we work with. It’s what we use for our small team here:
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt
It some ways, it works like a glorified shared e-mail system here. However, it allows to you add custom fields that e-mail doesn’t have, like classifying each request with a type such as “Sales Inquiry” or “Product Return”.
E-mail is still a central part of the application. Requests can come in that way, and reps can respond by e-mail.
Mark
September 30th, 2006 at 5:05 am
Mark,
Thanks very much for the link. I’ll pursue that avenue next week. A few high(er) priority items came up the past couple of days. However, to support your theory, I noticed this message (occurring frequently) in the log:
imapd[9999] Killed (lost mailbox lock) user=xxx host=xxx
This may well point to a sharing problem!
I changed the “Connection Cache” value from 5 to 1 so that the user could click another folder and thereby force an update to the server. This has once again only worked “so-so”.
I’ll submit another comment once I pursue the shared folders idea.
Till then …
Brian
October 4th, 2006 at 4:34 am
Mark,
Well you certainly hit the nail on the head. The mail “server” that comes with OS X does not support shared folders. At all. No wonder I’ve been pulling my hair out. As I mentioned earlier I simply activated the native IMAP server functions using Cutedge Systems excellent MailServe program. I’ve emailed them for support but I imagine I’ll need to upgrade the entire OS to OS X Server in order to properly implement our requirements.
Thank you kindly for your expert help and advice! It is greatly appreciated.
Brian
December 11th, 2006 at 8:13 am
[...] Here is a great article on 5 Power Tips for Thunderbird which I learned about via mention on Andy Wibbel’s blog. [...]
December 21st, 2006 at 4:31 pm
Thanks to all for the tips.
I use thunderbird, but I read email from multiple computers (work, home, and several laptops). I can set up thunderbird and imap so that, as Mark mentions above, it is possible to have all of my mail syncronized, but it does not syncronize any of the address book, RSS feed information, preferences, extensions, and (most importantly), the learned spam filter settings. Basically, I need a solution like ‘unison’, but I don’t want to have to deal with manually synchronizing each time I end a session (if I’m at an airport and need to quickly shutdown, which happens often for example).
Has anyone found a solution for this? I’ve found a number of potentially relevant links and I’d be interested to find out if anyone has tried them. These include:
1) http://kb.mozillazine.org/Synchronizing_mail_on_two_computers_%28Thunderbird%29
mentions a link that mentions ‘FolderShare’, a program to automatically syncronize
folders over the network. It sounds like it does what ‘unison’ does, but it
doesn’t require manual synchronization.
Has anyone tried FolderShare for thunderbird? How well does it work?
2) http://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Thunderbird:2.0_Product_Planning
It is acked by the mozilla thunderbird team, but I’m not sure if it will make it into 2.0
(it doesn’t say).
thanks!
December 25th, 2006 at 6:43 am
Your message gave me an idea that I think improves the process for both of us. Here’s what I currently do. On my laptop, I made this tiny script called “tbird_sync”. It contains just this:
#!/bin/sh
# resolve all conflicts in favor of the work computer, to insure it doesn't get messed up!
unison -prefer="ssh://mark@me.myhost.com//home/mark/" -batch -ui=text thunderbird
###
In that script “thunderbird” is the name of my unison profile. The “prefer” options means it never asks me questions and the “ui=text” makes it run noticeably faster than launching a GUI.
A simple modification could be made to the script so that it launched Thunderbird after the sync:
unison -prefer="ssh://mark@me.myhost.com//home/mark/" \
-batch -ui=text thunderbird && mozilla-thunderbird
Admittedly, that doesn’t address the shutdown-and-then-sync case at the airport, but if you are using IMAP, the critical part– the mail– would already be sync unless you were working offline, which adds it’s own complication in any case.
I suppose I probably lose minor preference changes sometimes because I forget to sync once, and then later the difference is always resolved in favor of the work computer. In practice, this has just never been a problem. IMAP handles keeping the critical e-mail data in sync.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
[...] For Thunderbird, the major problem is in navigating between folders, and moving messages around. The Nostalgy extension fixes that little issue with one-key activation of move/copy/goto and selection is via a completion menu. Now I can jump to the inbox by typing gin<ENTER> no matter where I am. Moving a message into archival is just as easy. (Thunderbird extensions were found by way of Summersault. [...]
February 23rd, 2007 at 2:07 pm
I love Firefox and recently changed from Windows Mail to Thunderbird after I installed Vista. Once I tweaked Thunderbird to do what I wanted, I like it better than Outlook Express. However, it’s pathetic that there’s not a BCC field by default.
May 16th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
I use Thunderbird with an IMAP server and a .procmailrc file on the server to control where messages land. I find that most Thunderbird folders do not refresh automatically and it’s not tied to the .procmailrc file. The only way I can be sure that I am seeing all my messages is by doing a message search (for whatever) and then magically I see unread messages in my folders! I may go back to pine….
Thanks.
Susan