Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog) [LWN.net]

Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog)

Posted Jul 24, 2006 20:11 UTC (Mon) by ceswiedler (subscriber, #24638)
In reply to: Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog) by hein.zelle
Parent article: Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog)

I used to do a lot of filtering on sender or organization (work, organization, etc) but Gmail has proven to me that efficient searching beats pre-organization nearly all of the time. If you can search for all messages by a certain sender as quickly as you can open folder, why put them in the folder? Folders (or labels, as Gmail does it) can be useful for things that can't easily be searched on, but for me, I've ended up with exactly zero of them. The advantage for me is that I don't need to do any sorting of my own mail, and my ability to find stuff is pretty much the same.

I don't mean to say that everyone should use Gmail (local clients have their advantages) but I'd encourage you to look at a search-based organization method instead.

(Log in to post comments)

Thunderbird can work more like Gmail

Posted Jul 25, 2006 15:01 UTC (Tue) by markjugg (guest, #25986) [Link]

GmailUI is a Thunderbird extension that adds some Gmail-inspired interface improvements to Thunderbird. Notably, easy archiving with the "y" key, a more a powerful quick search, modeled after the quick-searching shortcuts that Gmail provides.

Thunderbird can work more like Gmail

Posted Jul 31, 2006 5:47 UTC (Mon) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

I often show a demonstration of GmailUI to people who might potentially switch to Thunderbird. Sometimes I even tell them (if I'm feeling really honest) that it's a separate extension :-)

Start with a busy folder with lots of messages. Type "/" (focus goes to the search field) then "f:whatever". Status bar say "141 matches found". As I keep typing " a:1" (mails with attachments), then " -some_common_word" and then " -one_more_common_word", and pausing after each term to look at the status bar, the matches found keep coming down until finally it hits "7 matches found". At this point a visual check finds me the email I want.

I haven't yet found another email client that can do this. In real time. On IMAP.

[Err, of course when I say "some_common_word" I'm only obfuscating my actual search terms for my privacy...]