Best practices for multi-account folder setup?
Where should I look for best practices re setting up Thunderbird folders for multiple user accounts?
I was a Eudora power user for over 20 years, and while I love Thunderbird so far, there is a learning curve. Given that I have >10 POP accounts and plan to import 20 years of POP mail, I want to make sure I avoid bad setup decisions that will cause headaches later, especially when I import 20 years of old emails.
Eudora had ONE inbox and folder hierarchy. It decided which account to reply from based on which account received the email. Since it didn't have tags, I sorted mail mostly by topic. A topic folder might contain email coming from several accounts. (For example, all my web admin stuff from multiple domains filtered to one folder.) I'm puzzling over the best way to handle these issues in Thunderbird.
Where can I get an overview of my options? How should I think through my new setup so it doesn't cause problems later (such as sending mail from the wrong account)? Is there a video overview or web discussion you can't point me at?
All Replies (3)
I presume you’ve already searched the web and haven’t found such a publication, haven’t you? There probably isn’t one, and I unfortunately do not know if any exists, but what I can point you to is the options you have with Thunderbird. How you make those options work for your particular use case is up to you.
For starters, and in my opinion this is the main best practice, is to use the special ‘’’’’Local Folders’’’’’ account in Thunderbird ‘’’as the designated account for your global inbox’’’, instead of using one of your POP accounts. That would be the ideal starting point because the Local Folders account is a pre-existing “system” account native to Thunderbird and is ready for use out of the box. In comparison, using any other POP account as the target for your joint/global inbox is a potential cause for confusion and blunders down the line when handling things in Thunderbird’s UI and your system’s filesystem, not to mention you would have to first add/setup that POP account before it’s available for use by other accounts.
Second, avoid renaming the Local Folders account. It may seem like a great idea at first, but it may cause confusion when dealing with filesystem objects because the filesystem will keep the original path name associated with the Local Folders account’s storage, unless you change that as well. Also, Thunderbird help/knowledge base articles are written with reference to default setups, so following such publications is easier when you have things such as the name of the Local Folders account and its filesystem storage path left unmodified. You may think you’ll always remember you renamed it, only to forget down the line when you need an urgent solution.
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unify-your-pop-email-accounts-global-inbox for how to proceed.
You can automate sorting of mail into folders using filters as explained here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/organize-your-messages-using-filters to reduce manual work, preferably after you've imported your 20-yr old folders to avoid conflicts. The folders need to be there first before you can configure filters to move messages to them.
It helps to know what account options you have in Thunderbird, so check out https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configuration-options-accounts
Stans, thank you! Yours is exactly the kind of strategic overview I looked for, but could not find. (I found lots of posts covering individual tactics and features, but they aren't very useful until AFTER I know what my options and best practices are.) And thanks for the links to the specific how-to articles.
I also have several Gmail accounts. How should I set them up so IMAP and POP accounts play nice with each other?
There's really nothing extraordinary you need to do when setting up the Gmail accounts for IMAP access. The default (automatic) account configuration options are good enough for most people. Thunderbird will keep them well separate to NOT cause any conflicts with the unified POP accounts, since IMAP accounts cannot be unified in the same way. That Global Inbox option only exists for POP accounts.
Note, however, that you can have a unified view of your accounts' system folders, for all accounts regardless of whether they are POP or IMAP. If I were you, I would follow the following order:
1. Unify POP accounts 2. Add Gmail IMAP accounts 3. Import Eudora mail 4. Switch to Unified view (Thunderbird's view menu > Folders > Unified) 5. Create filters as needed
You can even have separate Thunderbird profiles, for example, one for your unified POP accounts and one for your IMAP accounts. Each profile will run in a separate Thunderbird instance/window. Only you can choose how to use multiple profiles and should be a piece of cake for a power user. I have two profiles, one for my main accounts from multiple providers and one for secondary accounts. The main profile is the default and it gets loaded when Tbird runs at startup, and I only launch the secondary profile when I need to. This wasn't always the case, initially I had all accounts in one profile, until I explored the concept of multiple profiles in browsers and adopted the same in Thunderbird as well. It helps to declutter Thunderbird when you have as many accounts as I do. If interested, learn more about profiles from these links:
Profiles - Where Thunderbird stores your messages and other user data