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Thunderbird for Isle of Harris email
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It makes sense to have Thunderbird automatically organise your mail for you as it arrives in your inbox and it makes this easy to do through its Message Filters.
The first step is to create sub-folders to automatically put your emails into as they arrive, common examples of sub-folders are "Friends", "Personal", "Work", "Important". To to create an email sub-folder friends all we have to do is right click on either the "Local Folders" or "Isle of Harris" ("Local Folders" if you're using POP, "Isle of Harris" if you're using IMAP)
Creating a "Friends" sub-folder in your Isle of Harris email
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| 1) Right click on the Isle of Harris mail folder in Thunderbird and select "New Folder" | 2) Enter "Friends" as the name of your new folder and click the OK button | 3) You now have a new "Friends" folder in your mailbox (Highlighted) |
You can add as many new folders as you like, you can also create a hierarchy of folders and create sub-folders within folders. Some people prefer to create their new folders as a sub-folder of their Inbox, if you want to organise your folders this way then simply right click on "Inbox" rather than the top level "Isle of Harris"
Creating a Message Filter for your Friends folder
1) Go to the Tools menu and select Message Filters
2) Click the New button to create a new message filter
3) Follow the steps above in order to create a filter. Filters are quite easy to understand, all you have to do is read them in correct order to see what action they'll take. The above filter reads as "for incoming messages where From email address contains joe@bloggs.com then move the message to Friends folder "
Filters make your life a lot easier as your emails automatically organise themselves into the correct order as they arrive in your inbox.
In step 3 above its best to enter an email address but if you fancy being a bit lazy you can just enter the name your friends use when emailing, e.g. if you entered in "Iain" then every email where the senders name was "Iain" would be moved to your Friends folder
You might have noticed the "+" buttons in the filter window. Filter rules are divided into 2 sections the Rules themselves and the actions, the "+" buttons allow you to combine rules and actions together. A good example of combining 2 actions together would be to move it to a folder and tag it as important.
Match any of the following is the standard option for filters, e.g. if you created a Filter called "All my friends" then you could use the "+" button to add more than one friends email address to your rule. With this emails from joe@bloggs.com or john@bloggs.com etc etc will be matched and moved to your friends folder. This is a nice way of grouping a lot of email addresses into a single Filter.
If you're a user of social network sites like Bebo, Facebook, etc then you can try using the steps above to create a folder called "Social Network" and create a rule to move emails from @bebo.com and @facebookmail.com into this folder (note you don't need a full email address to match rule, as long as the senders name contains bebo.com then it will be matched.
You could follow the same pattern to create a folder called "Shopping" and a message filter to move mail from amazon.co.uk, next.co.uk, warehouse.co.uk, ebay.co.uk, play.com etc etc into your Shopping folder