Five Power Tips for Thunderbird

Five Power Tips for Thunderbird
Posted by Mark Stosberg on July 20th, 2006

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.