Group Your Email Messages into Conversational Style Formatting of emails in Thunderbird (Tree-like Structure) Rather Each Than Sorted Separately by Date.
Conversational Style Formatting of emails in Thunderbird
Sorting emails by date is the most common way emails are arranged in either a desktop email client or web-based. However, you can also sort them by host of other factors, like by ‘From,’ ‘Attachments’, and so on.
However, one type of arrangement or sorting doesn’t exactly fit with these options. It’s called conversational emails. Basically, when you reply to an email and you get another reply back, that last message goes to the inbox sorted by date. For some users, it can be valuable to keep those “replies” inside a single tree-like structure. In simple terms, it looks like text chat.
It is also beneficial when you have multiple people replying to a single email thread. By keeping them all under one conversation, you will have far better way of organizing such threads, as opposed to keeping every single email reply separate.
Thunderbird calls this feature “threading”.
How to Turn on Conversational Emails Style in Thunderbird
In some cases, it can be on by default, but if it is not, here’s how you can enable it:
- Go to ‘Menu’ and select ‘View’
- Go to ‘Sort by’ and select “Threaded”
All your emails under a single thread or conversation will be grouped together. You can also expand or collapse them by the arrow next to the subject.
To turn off Conversational Emails Style in Thunderbird
To disable, go back to the ‘Menu’ → View → Sort by → and select “Unthreaded.” All those emails under a thread will go back to separate emails.
Perform Basic Actions to Threads
One of the top reasons to enable this feature is that you can delete, archive, or perform all such actions in bulk to all the emails in a conversation. It is time-saving, especially in those cases where you get short replies that are not worth saving or reading them again in the future, for example, “Thanks” or similar one-word replies.
To delete all emails under a thread, collapse the thread and delete the top one. You can also expand the thread and then delete specific ones.
Turn Off New Email Notifications for a Thread
Second reason to keep this option is that you can also turn off notifications for new emails in a thread. It works very much like any other social media sites where you can turn off notifications so you don’t get notified for any new comments/replies/emails/etc.
Thunderbird calls ignoring new messages as “Ignore thread.” You can do it by simply right-clicking the thread you want to ignore and then select “Ignore Thread.” All the emails after the primary one (the one that started the conversation) will be hidden. To reverse this, simply right-click and select “Ignore threads” again.
If you want to keep the threads ignored but want to see the conversation temporarily, do this: go to View -> Threads and check “Ignored threads.”
Need More options?
The preexisting features in Thunderbird are enough for most users. But if you want more freedom to organize your emails and conversations in a way that you find best, there are many third-party addons or extensions you can search for. Check the Mozilla Thunderbird addons site (https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/) and look for an extension that does what you need.