Rohan Almeida’s Blog
Perl Developer. Linux Advocacy. Practicing Guitarist.

Email has now become the tool of choice for quick and effective business communication. From the biggest companies to the smallest start-up, we all use email daily to communicate with Our Clients as well as for internal team communication. Although email does lack the collaborative feature, its the best tool for one-to-one communication. Did I say it lacked the collaborative feature? My bad! Mailing lists are definitely how a group can exchange thoughts among its members.

In this blog post, I’ll share with you how I use Thunderbird to improve my email productivity. We’ll start off with a fictitious project titled projectX with a fictitious client The Client. My objective is to have all email communication related to this project to be kept under one single folder. I hate using the Sent folder to look back on what I had written before. We’ll also use Threaded View for displaying the list of messages.

The people involved are:

• Rohan Almeida - almeida@aarohan.biz
• The Client - rohan@almeida.in

The first thing I’ll do is create a project folder under Inbox

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The next step would be creating message filters so Thunderbird can correctly sort the incoming email into this folder. Before we do that, I first use a neat little trick so that all my outgoing emails are sent back to me (via a bcc), so I can filter these into the projectX folder.

For this, go to Edit > Account Settings > Your Account > Copies & Folders

All outgoing emails are now sent back to me! You can opt not to save a copy in the Sent folder if you would like to save space, since we will have them in the projectX folder anyway.

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On to the message filters now. Go to Tools > Message Filters, and create a new filter as shown below.

This filter sets up Thunderbird so that all incoming email from the almeida.in domain (The Client’s domain) is set to be moved to the projectX folder. Cool! Now we also need a filter for my outgoing emails.

This filter sets up Thunderbird so that all incoming email with a To header containing the almeida.in domain (The Client’s domain) is set to be moved to the projectX folder. Incoming email? To header? Yes. Recollect the Bcc step? So when I send an email to the client, this email is sent back to me and has a To header containing The Client’s email domain. So Thunderbird moves this into the projectX folder. Very cool!

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Lets now look like at an email discussion between me and The Client. I start off with a query.

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Thanks to the bcc and the outgoing filter setup, this email now lands into the projectX folder.

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The Client replies. Make sure you have enabled the Threaded View in Thunderbird.

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A couple of emails later.

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Notice how emails with a different subject are automatically grouped under a single thread? Doesn’t this view give you a better picture of your email conversations?

Also since the filters are applied to a domain, all emails related to the Client’s company will get filtered into the projextX folder. Hmmm.. what if I now want to separate multiple projects of the same Client? I’ve found that I’m not in need of this right now, as the curernt method still offers me much more control over the communication than without threads, and this would be a task for another day.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.