In part 2 of this thrilling (well at least helpful?) series on Thunderbird I am going to cover Message filters. These should be the stable diet of any discerning person who receives more than a couple emails a day, hell I seem to get 10x that in spam – but that’s for another day.
Filtering is an effective way to manage your email. Whether separating your work email from your personal mail, your eBay messages from your (genuine) bank messages or your DVD rentals from your squash club newsletter, filters can be used to manage your time more effectively. By setting up message filters in Thunderbird you can automatically organise, file and sort your incoming mail in many different ways. Fortunately filters are also quick and easy to setup in Thunderbird.
- From the ‘Tools’ menu option, click on ‘Message Filters’ to open up the filter dialog box.
- Select the account you wish to filter from the drop down box.
- Click on the ‘New’ button to open up the new filters dialogue box.
- Give the filter a name.
- At this point you can begin to refine the selection process based on what you require the filter to do. The filter system allows you to add multiple conditions based on your requirements. Select from ‘Match all of the following’ or ‘Match any of the following’.
- The first section allows for your conditions based on the variables entered. For example ‘From’ ‘is’ ‘info@anysite.com’. Further conditions can be added using the ‘+’ button.
- The second section is where you decide on the action of the filter. This can be configured to move to a specific folder or the addition of labels or flags. Further actions can be added using the ‘+’ button.
- Clicking Ok adds the filter to the ‘Message Filters’ dialogue box. This filter can be ‘run now’ by selecting the filter and clicking the corresponding button at the bottom of the dialog box.
- From this dialogue box you can also edit and delete existing filters at any point. Messages are also run in the order they are listed and so they can be arranged in the order of preference by using the adjacent buttons.
Message filters can also be run at any point by selecting the ‘Run Filters now’ option from the tools menu. Filters can be set up based on an email address quickly by right clicking on the email address in the message window and clicking ‘Create Filter From Message….’.
Whats up next? We’re moving into really making the most of one of the power features built into Thunderbird, Saved Search or Smart Folders.
