Help me make sticky emails in Thunderbird!

April 8, 2008 9:47 AM

Thunderbird: How can I make messages 'sticky'?

I've just switched from Outlook, where I sorted my mail by flag status and then by date (a nested sort). When I would apply "flag for follow-up" to some random email, it would jump to the top of my list like a BBS 'sticky'. I can get a sort by tag/date view (unthreaded) in Thunderbird which looks like what I want, but when I apply a tag to an untagged email, it just sits there instead of joining its tagged buddies at the top. The sort isn't 'live' or refreshable. How do I get my old sticky behavior back?

Here's what my ideal inbox looks like (* = tag / star / whatever works):

* newest
* newish
* old
newest
newish
old
pre-historic

Applying the * to a non-starred email makes it jump to the top (* newest).

Thanks for making my world complete again.

posted by cowbellemoo to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Weird, I can't find a way to make it work, either.

A work-around:

View another folder, then view your current folder again. With the mouse, just click another folder, then click your original folder again. From the keyboard, shift-tab to get to the folder-list pane, arrow key down (to go to the next folder), then arrow-key up to return to your original folder. The folder is now re-sorted.

You might also submit this as a feature request to the Thunderbird team. Seems like it'd be a nice feature to have.
posted by kristi at 2:59 PM on April 8

Ah! Excellent! I noticed that it would sort/update the list correctly when I exited and restarted the program, too. The workaround is fine for me. I don't typically sticky things all the time, just certain things once in a while to keep them in front of me, so the inconvenience isn't big. (And the performance improvement over outlook isn't something I'd give up regardless).

Thanks!
posted by cowbellemoo at 4:07 PM on April 8