thunderbird navigation

June 3, 2008 4:05 AM

keyboard navigation in thunderbird when mails are sorted by sender - how can it be done.

In a few of my Thunderbird folders i have several thousand emails. Every so often i need to find a specific email.

In windows explorer i usually navigate to the right place by typing the first couple of letters on the keyboard and windows automatically highlights the first file with those letters.

Is it possible to do something like this in Thunderbird. For example selecting sort by sender and then typing the name. This does not work in my setup as it only triggers some random shortcut key combination.

I would rather not use the scrollwheel, arrows or scrollbar at all.

posted by FidelDonson to computers & internet (5 comments total)

If you click on the magnifying glass icon in the little search box in the top right of the main Thunderbird window, you'll expose a menu that lets you choose what to search by, and Sender is one of the options. Typing into that search box will filter your mail view accordingly; then two presses on Tab puts a highlight bar on the top email in the search result; then down-arrow moves through them.
posted by flabdablet at 4:42 AM on June 3

Thanks - i know but i find thunderbird search is a bit slow in sifting through my hordes of mail. Better than going mousewheel though.
posted by FidelDonson at 7:00 AM on June 3

If you repeatedly look for the same people you can create Search Folders (which for me do seem almost instant, searching 25000 emails in several folders).

Two other things might help, although they dont eliminate mousing, but might make it less tedious. Pressing G groups they by whatever column you select, and collapses them all, which would lessen the amount of scrolling you need.

Also the Seek extension categorises and arranges the folder by various criteria, date, sender and so on.
posted by Boobus Tuber at 8:54 AM on June 3

In TBird there are many keystrokes (e.g., F, N, T, B, P) that are used for navigating messages, so there's a reason that you'll never get the same kind of behavior you get from your file manager.

Personally, I find the Thunderbird search extremely slow and I use my desktop search application (Copernic) whenever I need to find a message that I know would take more than a few seconds in browsing the folder -- basically anything more than a week old.
posted by camcgee at 9:12 AM on June 3

Thanks all. Im going to try out the seek extension. And also look into desktop search applications.
posted by FidelDonson at 11:36 AM on June 3