OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox, and Thunderbird for Windows All in One [Electronic resources]

Greg Perry, M. T. Cozzola, Jennifer Fulton

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نمايش فراداده

161. Organize Incoming Mail

154 Get Your Email

You won't have Thunderbird up and running for very long before you start pondering the universal problem of managing all that mail. In

155 Find a Message , you learned to sort your mail and to search for a particular message. In

160 Handle Junk Mail , you learned how to enable Thunderbird's automatic junk mail handler to manage most if not all of your incoming junk mail. Still, what should you do with messages from your department head, email from your kid's teachers, personal email from friends and family, and so on? One way to tackle the problem is to delete email after you've read it, unless you're sure you'll need to refer to it again. Messages you keep can then be organized into special folders. You can even set up

filters that handle some of this organizing for you automatically. For example, you can have emails from Uncle Bill and Aunt Judith automatically routed into the

Family folder.

KEY TERM

Filter A set of instructions that tells Thunderbird what to do with particular pieces of incoming mail.

1.

Click Delete

If a piece of incoming mail was interesting but not important enough to keep, delete it by selecting the message and clicking the

Delete button on the

Mail toolbar.

NOTE

Deleted messages are moved to the

Trash folder for that particular email account, where they are kept until the trash is "emptied." To do that, select the email account from the

Folders list, choose

File, Empty Trash . To have Thunderbird empty the

Trash folder for an account every time you close the program, choose

Tools, Account Settings , select the

Server Settings page for that email account, and enable the

Empty Trash on Exit option.

161. Organize Incoming Mail

[View full size image]

NOTE

Compact email folders from time to time to reduce their size, expecially after deleting or moving a lot of messages. Select a folder (such as

Local Folders ) from the

Folder list on the left, and then choose

File, Compact Folders .

2.

Choose File, New, New Folder

To create a new folder in which to place specific messages, select the folder into which you want this new folder placed from the

Folders list on the right side of the Thunderbird window. Then choose

File, New, New Folder (or

New Subfolder ). The

Create New Folder (or

Subfolder ) dialog box appears.

3.

Type New Folder Name and Click OK

Type a

Name for the new folder. Then verify that the

Create as a subfolder of list box shows the folder into which you want this new folder placed and click

OK . The folder appears in the

Folders list.

4.

Move Messages

Now that you have a folder for specific messages you want to organize, select the message(s) you want to move into the new folder and then drag and drop them on that folder in the

Folders list.

5.

Choose Tools, Message Filters

To create a filter to automatically organize specific types of incoming mail, choose

Tools, Message Filters from the menu. The

Message Filters dialog box appears.

TIP

If you've received a message you'd like to use as a basis for a filter, select that message and, in the message header that appears just above the message text, click the

From address. From the shortcut menu that appears, select

Create Filter from Message . The

Filter Rules dialog box opens, and the sender's email address is copied to the criteria section described in step 8.

6.

Select Account

From the

Filters for list, select the email account for which you want to set up this filter. I wanted the filter to apply to both my email accounts; because both accounts are included under

Local Folders , I selected

Local Folders from the

Filters for list.

7.

Click New

Click

New to create a new filter. The

Filter Rules dialog box appears.

8.

Identify Message Type

Type a name for the new filter in the

Filter name box. Then set criteria that identify the type of message you want filtered. First, choose either

Match all of the following or

Match any of the following criteria. In the list boxes, make selections that identify the message type. For example, if you want to filter messages that come from a specific individual, select

From in the first list,

Contains in the second list, and type all or part of the person's name from the third list.

Click

More to add more criteria as desired. For example, you might want to filter messages from your boss that contain the word

meeting in the subject heading.

9.

Set Rules and Click OK

In the bottom part of the

Filter Rules dialog box, you tell Thunderbird what to do with messages that meet your criteria. You can have the messages moved to a specific folder, copied to a folder, labeled, deleted, prioritized, or marked as junk. You can make multiple selections here; for example, you can have a message moved to a folder

and labeled

Important . Click

OK to create the filter. You're returned to the

Message Filters dialog box.

10.

Run Filter

To run the filter now on existing messages, click

Run Now . Messages that match your criteria are identified, and the action you selected is taken. The filter you just created is automatically run against any incoming messages from this point forward.

TIP

In the

Filter Rules dialog box, you can create a folder into which Thunderbird will copy or move the matching messages by clicking the

New Folder button, entering a folder

Name , and selecting a folder into which you want it placed from the

Create as a subfolder of list.