10 Thunderbird Tips To Organize Your Inbox With Ease

Whether you are a normal user or a business owner, it is natural that you get tons of emails every day in this age of technology.

Therefore it becomes imperative that you get yourself a good email client.

Thunderbird is one such email client.

Because of its good design, responsive user interface, and capacity to handle multiple emails from different email addresses, this email client has become one of the world’s top 5 most used email clients.

Although Thunderbird helps enhance your email experience and saves you a lot of time and effort when managing emails daily, it also has several problems of its own.

Errors such as resetting server connection, loading slowly, and messy inbox are some of the drawbacks of using Thunderbird.

However, in this article, we shall discuss some creative tips on how you can organize your inbox in Thunderbird.

Table of Contents

10 Tips To Organize Your Inbox In Thunderbird

1. Change your notifications when new messages arrive in your inbox

Typically, whenever any new messages arrive on Thunderbird, a small notification pops up at the bottom-right corner of your screen, along with a sound.

Although it is a great way to receive alerts and a small section of the message, many individuals might find it annoying to get these alerts constantly.

So, you can change your notifications when new messages arrive in your inbox in Thunderbird. To do this, follow these steps:

First, click the three horizontal bars on the top-right and choose Preferences.

Alternatively, you can also go to Tools > Preferences from the main menu.

(Tip: If you do not see the main menu, just press Alt on your keyboard)
Under preferences, go to General > Incoming Mails.

From there, you can choose what to do in case of the arrival of a new mail.

You can show an alert, play a different sound, or choose not to show an alert or play a sound, among other things.

2. Remove the welcome screen on Thunderbird

Whenever you open your Thunderbird client, you will automatically get a welcome screen. The welcome screen will be right below the messages section.

Only when you click on a message will the welcome screen be replaced by the message’s contents.

However, there is a way to remove the welcome screen from appearing on your Thunderbird home screen.

Doing this might also make your Thunderbird screen cleaner.

Here is how you do it.

Go to the three horizontal bars > Preferences or through Tools > Preferences

On the top of the General Preferences, Unselect the “When Thunderbird launches, show the Start Page in the Message area” option.

Now, you will no longer see the Mozilla Thunderbird welcome page asking for donations.

However, for some reason, if you want that welcome page back on, you can simply press Alt + Home or go to the three horizontal bars > Go > Mail Start Page.

3. Create and work with new folders

Your inbox consisting of only a single folder will give you more trouble managing your emails.

All the emails like important emails and junk mails like spam will be in a single folder.

Because of this, you not only need to use a large amount of effort to sort out your mails but even some important mails might be overlooked.

So, making new folders and placing the incoming email messages in them is a good idea to organize your inbox in Thunderbird.

You can make any number of folders and subfolders for a single email in Thunderbird.

Go to your email and right-click.
Scroll down and click on New folder to create a new folder.

To create a subfolder, just right-click on your folder and select New Subfolder.

4. Automatically delete messages on your inbox

After creating folders and subfolders on your email in Mozilla Thunderbird, you can perform this task.

With folders and subfolders, you can automatically delete your email history after a certain time period or by defining the limit of the number of messages on that folder/subfolder.

Right-click on your folder or subfolder.
Scroll down to Properties > Retention Policy.

Select your desired preferences on the number of emails stored on the folder and time period to delete your emails in the “Use my account settings field.”

5. Tag your messages in the inbox

Tagging your email messages is a great way to categorize the emails based on their importance, privacy, and other criteria.

In Thunderbird, you can tag an email message based on whether they are very important, relatively important, and other ways.

This way, you can easily distinguish which emails need to be replied to urgently and which can be replied to later.

To tag an email message on Thunderbird, just select the email message and press the keys 1,2,3,4, or 5.

The tagging of messages on Thunderbird with the key 1 = (Red/Important), 2 + (Orange/Work), 3 = (Green/Personal), 4 = (Blue/ To Do), 5 (Purple/Later).

You can also add your tag to the message and your own criteria.

6. Select multiple messages and mark them are read

If you do not want to mark the messages as read by selecting each one individually, there is an option in Thunderbird to select multiple messages at once and mark them as read.

This is a very simple method, and here is how it is done.

Open your inbox containing the message list.
Right-click on the top column and click on Select Messages.

Now, a new column with checkboxes will appear on the left side from where you can select multiple or all messages.

After selecting the messages, right-click on the messages and choose Mark > As read.

This will help mark multiple or all messages as read on your Thunderbird inbox.

7. Add a dark theme to your Thunderbird

If you are a night person or do not like operating your device in light theme, you can enable light theme on Mozilla Thunderbird.

To enable the dark theme on Thunderbird, follow these steps:

Go to the three horizontal bars on top-right and select “Add-ons and Themes.”

Under the Dark theme, click on Enable.

8. Sort your messages on Inbox and use the Quick Filter

Sorting out your messages in your inbox is a must while going through your emails.

Thunderbird has made it easy to sort out your messages in your inbox.

To sort out the messages in your inbox, just click on the top columns through which you want to sort out your messages.

For example, just click on the Date column if you want to sort out your messages by date.

There is also a Quick Filter feature on Thunderbird, which will help you filter out the messages in your inbox much faster.

To use this feature, just click on Quick Filter at the top of your message list, and you can filter out the messages based on their read status, tags, attachments, contacts, etc.

9. Directly delete the junk messages without putting them in the Junk folder

If you do not want to receive the junk messages on the Junk folder and fill up the storage on your device, Thunderbird has an option that allows you to directly delete the messages you labeled as ‘Junk’ instead of sending them to the Junk folder.

So, to use this option and directly delete the junk messages, follow these steps.

Click on the three horizontal lines on the top of your Thunderbird screen.
Click on Preferences.
Now, go to Privacy & Security.

Scroll down to the Junk section and click on the check box saying, “When I mark messages as Junk.”
Select the option to delete them.

You can also mark the junk messages as ’read’ or enable adaptive junk filter logging through the Junk section.

10. Clear your Thunderbird Cache

Thunderbird will sometimes have difficulty loading and performing its functions when its cache becomes large.

In such cases, you need to clear your Thunderbird cache. Here is how you clear out your Thunderbird cache

Go to your system preferences through the three horizontal lines at the top-right.
Under General, scroll down to Network & Disk Space.
Click on the Clear Now option under the Disk Space section.