Use Thunderbird to Collect All Your Emails in One Place
We’re much more used to checking email in a browser tab or downloading a mobile app now, but for years everyone used desktop clients to get email and try to get their inboxes in some order – and since 2003, Mozilla Thunderbird turned out to be one of the best programs for this job.
A desktop app like Thunderbird offers several advantages over a web client, not least the ability to collect emails from multiple accounts—Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.—and put them in one place. This also means you can manage your email even when you’re offline (though, of course, you can’t send or receive messages without an Internet connection).
Key features of Thunderbird
For starters, Thunderbird is free to download and run, and unlike Apple Mail, for example, it’s available on Windows, macOS and Linux, so anyone can use it. There are no extra features you’ll have to pay for and no ongoing subscription you’ll need to maintain (you probably already have enough of those ). You can make a donation to support the development of Thunderbird if you find it useful and can afford it.
Once you’re in the app itself, you’ll have plenty of features available to you: support for keyboard shortcuts , quick and easy searches, advanced filters to automatically sort messages as they arrive, extensive control over the appearance of the app, and a color-coding feature that lets you organize messages by folders (for example, you can have separate tags for work and personal emails).
You can also manage calendars, contacts, and tasks inside Thunderbird, so it’s essentially a complete suite of productivity tools for your desktop. You can choose the order in which you see your messages, you can arrange the different panels a few different ways, and you can choose to have conversations appear in a thread (like the default in Gmail) or without a thread.
Thunderbird uses a tabbed interface by default (though you can change this if you need to), just like your web browser probably does. You can open individual posts in separate tabs to make them easier to navigate, and even Settings and other pages get their own tabs. What’s more, there are plenty of third-party add-ons covering everything from language translation to attachment extraction.
Adding email accounts
Go to the official Thunderbird website to download the software. During the installation process, you’ll be asked to enter details for one of your email accounts: for most common accounts, including iCloud and Gmail, Thunderbird already knows the necessary configuration settings. In most cases, all that is required is your email address and password to access it.
Some accounts may require some preparation in order for Thunderbird to see your emails correctly. For example, if you’re using Gmail with Thunderbird, you’ll need to make sure it’s open to desktop clients: In the web version of Gmail, click the gear icon (top right), select View all settings , and then select Forwarding and POP/IMAP. . Make sure IMAP access is enabled to use Thunderbird.
If your email accounts are protected by two-factor authentication ( and they should be ), you may need to download an authenticator app or follow the instructions on your phone to grant access to Thunderbird. For example, for Apple iCloud accounts protected by two-factor authentication, you’ll need to go to your Apple account page on the web and click App-Specific Passwords to create a password for Thunderbird.
If you’re having any problems with any of your accounts, a quick visit to the help pages for that account or browsing the Thunderbird support forums will help you get started. Once you’ve connected them, Thunderbird begins downloading the latest messages from your various mailboxes, with both folders and accounts given their own entries in the left-hand navigation pane.
Message management
To collect all messages from different accounts together, click the three dots at the top of the left navigation bar, then select Folder Views > Unified Folders . You can gain more control over which messages are shown (such as unread or flagged) and the order in which they appear by clicking the filter buttons above the main message list.
There’s a dedicated app menu button next to the search bar that looks like three horizontal lines: tap it to access a variety of layout options and other settings. For example, you can place your main email list to the side of or on top of message threads—and there are three different density settings, so you can also choose how much white space you see inside the Thunderbird interface.
To search messages across all your accounts, use the search box at the top of the Thunderbird window. Each new search query appears in its own tab, so it’s easy to keep track of them, and you can search for emails from (or to) a specific contact, mentioning certain words, or in a specific folder. There’s even a timeline that shows the frequency of matches over time.
Filters are always useful in email clients too and can save you a significant amount of time. Click the app menu button at the top (three horizontal lines), then Tools > Message Filters , and you can start creating a filter: you can set all kinds of criteria (such as message content or message sender) to result in any kind of actions (for example, archiving messages or adding a star to them).