Advanced E-mail Organization

People who receive a high volume of e-mail typically use two related systems for keeping things organized: folders and rules.

Folders

Folders are a way of subdiving your e-mail into related groups. For example, if you're working on a certain large project, you might want to store all e-mail conversations between you and your partners in a single folder so that you can quickly review everything that's been said so far.

Your e-mail account contains a lot of things, such as your Inbox, Deleted Items, Calendar, Sent Items, etc. Technically, you can create folders anywhere in here, but it's usually much less confusing if you keep them contained inside your Inbox, the large folder where all your new mail is placed automatically.

Creating folders

Moving things in and out of folders

Rules

You can also establish a set of rules that dictate how incoming mail is received. A typical rule might be:

• Move any incoming message with "Digester" in the title to the Digesters folder (assuming you've created a special folder called "Digesters" or
• Delete all messages sent from eBay (*@eBay.com)

Rules allow you to automate much of your preliminary e-mail organization.

Creating rules

Note: While Thunderbird (as well as most other mail clients) supports its own special rules system, it's recommended that you use your account's built-in one or confusing things can happen.