You could show the Tag column (right-click any column button, select a column title), then click the Tag column button to sort by tag, ascending or descending.

I could not hit a certain tag faster. Now I have another problem: the Thunderbird bar with all the commands like tag, unread messages etc. disappeard. How can I restore this line on top of the E-Mails? Thanks from the geographic center of Germany

Do you mean the Quick Filter Bar? It's enabled under View/Toolbars. Press Alt if the Menu Bar, with View, is hidden, or right-click near the top of the TB window.

Now I can enable tool bars, except the Quick Filter Bar. It is not highlighted and I cannot click it. Could I filter the tags with it and jump to any tag on my long list just by pressing a letter key? I appreciate any answers.

Do you not see Quick Filter Bar in the View menu as in the attached picture? After you click the Tags button on the bar, to show messages with tags, there are additional buttons to show messages with particular tags, i.e. show only Important or Work tags.

The only 'jump by key' add-on I know of is one that works on the Subject, From etc.:

https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/index-en.html#jumpbykey

I appreciate your answer. While I can see the Quick Filter Bar, I cannot click it. Searching for messages, I can find tags entering them into the search field with ‚Ctrl-K‘ (why K and not F?). However, my question concerns tagging messages. When I open a new E-Mail, I want to to choose among the 220 tags I created to classify it. Now I have to scroll these tags from A to Z which takes longer than if I could jump directly to the tag or at least to the letter with which the tags begins. Thanks again for dealing with my issue.

melbal said

I can find tags entering them into the search field with ‚Ctrl-K‘ (why K and not F?).

Already used for Find (ctrl+F) and a Windows standard for find. Ctrl+Shift+F searches messages and offer the chance to save the search as a virtual folder. Ctrl+K is a general search using the Gloda search engine. Ctrl+Shift+K is search using the quick search you apparently had lost.

melbal said

I appreciate your answer. While I can see the Quick Filter Bar, I cannot click it. Searching for messages, I can find tags entering them into the search field with ‚Ctrl-K‘ (why K and not F?). However, my question concerns tagging messages. When I open a new E-Mail, I want to to choose among the 220 tags I created to classify it. Now I have to scroll these tags from A to Z which takes longer than if I could jump directly to the tag or at least to the letter with which the tags begins. Thanks again for dealing with my issue.

There seems to be an issue with Linux users not being able to distinguish a row of buttons; they all blend into a single 'button', even though clicking on the button text does perform the action. See the attached picture for an example of the Quick Filter Bar with the Tags button selected.

As for being able to jump to a tag when applying it to a message, I know of no options. You may want to consider using distinct folders instead of tags, as there are ways to move messages to folders using shortcuts.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/quick-folder-move/

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/quickarchiver/

sfhowes said

You could show the Tag column (right-click any column button, select a column title), then click the Tag column button to sort by tag, ascending or descending.

I guess it was not the question "how to display assigned tags per message" but rather to assign one or multiple tags out of a significant huge list without scrolling down endlessly each single tag one by one until the appropriate tag/s is/are found. Using the page-up/page-down buttons at the tag list would be a first alternative but unfortunately they do not work (Pos1- and End-buttons do work but not the PageDown- and PageUp-buttons). I use Thunderbird 60.2.1 on Ubuntu 18.04.

When I right-click, I cannot select a tag. Is there a way that I type the beginning of a tag and Thunderbird jumps to it?