Seeing Stars With Thunderbird

Aug 2nd, 07 | 5 remarks

I’m a big fan of Thunderbird. I took a somewhat frightening step away from Outlook for it about a six months ago, and once I got comfortable, I’ve never looked back. One of my favorite features, aside from the Lightning plugin, and color-coded tagging, is the ability to mark email messages with stars (think flags).

Instead of bothering to remember which flag denotes what, you have only one simple star icon to mark or clear messages. Very useful in quickly scanning your inbox for items you’ve marked as “need to research” or “need to re-read”, or something of that nature… but it also provides the perfect filter system for email you need to reply to!

  • Go to Tools > Message Filters and click the New button on the right
  • Give your filter a name and apply the Status option to the first drop-down selector
  • Choose the Starred option for the third drop-down

hacking thunderbird with stars

  • In the second grouping of options, choose which folder you want starred items to appear. (I created one and gave it only an asterisk for the name.)
  • Be sure to select Copy Message to from the first drop-down, unless you prefer that all starred email be automatically removed from your inbox after marking it.

Bing! You’re done. (Sorry, I watched that episode of Friends the other night where Chandler’s boss was always slapping his backside and calling him BING! I guess it stuck with me today.) :p

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  1. Kim Oppalfens

    This is all nice and well, but unfortunately in the new thunderbird this doesn’t work for news messages, which is rather annoying.

    Aug 5, 07 | 9:46 am

  2. Char

    Thanks for the tip. I love Thunderbird and won’t touch Outlook with a 10-foot pole these days. Anything to make keeping track of messages I need to follow up on easier is a good thing.

    Aug 9, 07 | 9:35 pm

  3. Stephen Cronin

    I use Thunderbird too (the PortableApps version), but I don’t use this feature. I’ll have to give it a try.

    I like Thundbird, although at times I find it a little slugish. Persisting with it mainly for the portability (comes with me on my USB drive). But there are some great features too - this may be one of them.

    Sep 3, 07 | 2:31 am

  4. Charity

    @ Stephen - wow, I wasn’t aware there was a portable version. You’re a step ahead of me on that one.

    I haven’t had any trouble with Thunderbird bogging down on me… but Firefox sure does sometimes. Good grief. Wouldn’t trade it for any other browser though! :)

    Sep 4, 07 | 4:51 pm

  5. Rufus

    Just an FYI, you don’t have to create this as a filter and copy e-mails.

    Go to Views -> Messages -> Customize. Create your filter for starred e-mails.
    Go to Views -> Messages -> Custom Views -> your new filter. You should see only starred ones now.
    Go to Views -> Messages -> Save view as a folder. Note you can have it search all your folders and do it in real time.

    You now have outlooks “For follow up” folder, but infinitely more flexible.

    May 14, 08 | 4:45 pm

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