Customizing Thunderbird

Make Thunderbird comfortable.

Why use Thunderbird? So that whenever you need a 4 yr old email with that certificate you have no physical copy of it, but you don't know the name of the mail, sender, or anything. Searching with Google takes too much time. Besides, it is always a good idea to keep a backup of your mail.

Install Following Extensions

• Minimize on Close
• Expression Search - NG

Set sort order for Mail default to Latest on top

Open the Config Editor from the following menu options:

Preferences > General > Config Editor(at the bottom)

Type mailnews.default in the Filter, bar to bring up a small list of preferences to configure. It will display similar to below:

Preference Name                      Status       Type        Value
mailnews.default_news_sort_order:    default      integer     x
mailnews.default_news_sort_type:     default      integer     y
mailnews.default_sort_order:         default      integer     x
mailnews.default_sort_type:          default      integer     y

In the above, replace the x and y of the value by double-clicking the name of the preference and replacing it with one of the following values as required:

x

1 = Ascending
2 = Descending

y

17 = None
18 = Date
19 = Subject
20 = Author
21 = ID (Order Received)
22 = Thread
23 = Priority
24 = Status
25 = Size
26 = Flagged
27 = Unread
28 = Recipient
29 = Location
30 = Label
31 = Junk Status
32 = Attachments
33 = Account
34 = Custom
35 = Received

To sort all mail by Date, Descending (newest at top), the preferences in the config editor will look like this:

mailnews.default_sort_order:    default     integer      2
mailnews.default_sort_type:     default     integer     18

Check this superuser thread for more detail on how to do this.

Set Max Server connections to 1

This is needed when using Gmail. If not set, then the google authentication fails if you have more than 1 operation running in the background. Go to

Account Settings > Server Settings > Advanced

Set Maximum number of server connections to cache to 1 instead of 5 which is the default.