Mozilla Thunderbird: Virtual Folders
December 2nd, 2006 | by Mitchell Allen |If you’re like me, you subscribe to dozens of alerts, email notification services from forums and blog subscriptions.
Unless you judiciously delete each email as soon as you have completed clicking on all of the hyperlinks within, these little notes will clutter up your email folders.
Preventive Measures
On the off-chance that your folders are pristine, here is a tip for you: don’t subscribe to any of those services!
Okay, seriously, decide on a single folder in which to store incoming alerts. As these messages trickle in, you can deal with them at your leisure and periodically mark them all for deletion.
Congratulations, you now have time to finish alphabetizing your DVD collection.
Take Back the Night
More than likely, you never gave this much thought and, if you are staying up past your bed time, struggling with deleting the alerts piecemeal, here is your tip for today: learn to filter your old email messages.
Nearly every email program in use today has a powerful filtering system. I use Mozilla Thunderbird and I discovered a useful feature, thanks to this alert from Heinz Tschabitscher on About.com:
Organize Mail Flexibly Using Virtual Folders in Mozilla Thunderbird
Basically, it is a saved search that spans all of your physical folders for matching criteria. By itself, it is a handy way to find email that may be scattered all over the place. A nice touch is that it updates itself whenever you click on it.
Well, if you create a search for all of your alerts, whenever you click on the virtual folder, you can then select all of the messages and delete them at once.
Outlook Good
With all of the features in Microsoft’s email programs, I’m sure you can do the same thing with their Find All and Advanced Find tools.
Hopefully, you will recover enough time to do more productive things, like organize your DVD Collection.
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