Thunderbird

Tagging and Marking Emails

If you are like most people, you probably receive a lot of email from friends, family, co-workers, and others. It can be very difficult to manage and keep track of all of those messages.

Thunderbird gives you two very powerful and useful ways to manage your messages: tagging and marking. Let's take a look them.

Tagging Emails

Using tags, you can give your email messages a priority or just categorize them in a way that makes sense for you. Thunderbird comes with several preset tags:

  • Important
  • Work
  • Personal
  • To Do
  • Later

Each tag has its own color.

Thunderbird_tagging

You can tag email messages with more than one tag. You can also add tags to the list or delete them.

Applying a tag to a message

When you want to apply a tag to a message, do this:

  1. Click on an email message that you want to tag in the Message pane.
  2. On the toolbar, click the Tag button. A list of tags appears.
  3. Click on the tag that you want to apply to the message. The tag appears in the message header in the Preview pane.
    Thunderbird_applied_tag

Creating a new tag

If you need to create a new tag, you can by doing this:

  1. Click the Tag button on the toolbar and then choose New Tag. The Create New Tag box appears.
    Create_New_Tag
  2. Type a name for the new tag, like "Family", in the Tag Name field.
  3. You can give the tag a color by clicking the box beside the Tag Name field and then choosing a color from the color picker.
  4. Click OK to save the tag. You can now apply it to a message using the Tag button on the toolbar.

Deleting a tag

You can get rid of tags that you no longer need by doing this:

  1. Do one of the following:
  • On Windows and Mac OS select Preferences from the Tools menu.
  • On Linux, select Preferences from the Edit menu.

The Thunderbird Preferences window opens.

  • Click Display and then click the Tags tab.
    Thunderbird_tagging_delete
  • Click the that you want to delete, then click Delete. No message appears asking whether or not you want to delete the tag. Once you delete a tag, it is gone.

  • Marking Emails

    Whenever you click on an email message in the Message pane, it is marked as having been read. Sometimes, though, you might want to revisit the message at a later date and will want to distinguish it from other messages in your inbox or in your mail folders. Or you might want to visually point out a message as being important using a star. Marking your emails is a simple but useful way of doing that. Here's how to do it.

    To mark your emails

    1. Right click on an email in the Message pane and then click Mark. A menu appears:

      Thunderbird_marking_markingMenu

    2. Select one of the options from the menu.