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Filters in Thunderbird

Filters provide a way to organize your incoming messages automatically, based on rules you create.

Some examples:

  • Gather all messages which were marked as probable spam by PureMessage in an out-of-the-way folder for eventual review. (What's PureMessage?)
  • Mark all messages from your boss high priority
  • Label as "important" all messages with "budget" or "fiscal" in the subject line (What's a label?)
  • Forward all messages older than one week AND not yet read to a colleague
  • Put all messages from people in your address book but not at Cornell into an "External Friends" folder

    (Sample filters page)

As an illustration, we'll set up the spam filter, which many people find very useful. We'll have Thunderbird look in the Subject line for the text that PureMessage adds when it thinks a message might be spam, and put those messages in our Probable Spam folder (How do I create a folder?), so they're not mixed in with our more important messages.

  1. From Thunderbird's Tools menu select Message Filters.
  2. To create a new filter, click New
  3. Give your filter a descriptive name, so that it will be easily identifiable.
  4. The radio buttons - Match all and Match any - only apply if you set more than one condition for this filter. In this example, we will only have one condition, so we'll leave this setting alone.
  5. The first drop-down list indicates where we want Thunderbird to look. In this case, we want it to look at the Subject line.
  6. The second drop-down list lets us choose the matching condition. In this case we can either select contains or begins with.
  7. Next we enter the text we want Thunderbird to look for. When PureMessage thinks a message may be spam, it puts [PMX:# at the beginning of the subject line, so that's what we'll put here.
    (The choices available to us in steps 6 & 7 change depending on what we selected in step 5. Try it and see...)
  8. If your filter requires Thunderbird to check for more than one condition, you'd click on the plus sign, and a second row would appear. When you specifiy more than one condition, use the radio buttons to indicate whether the filter is activated when Thunderbird finds any of the conditions or all of the conditions. This example only uses one condition, so we'll move on.
  

  1. Next, in the Perform these actions section, the first drop-down list shows all the actions we might want Thunderbird to take when it finds a message that meets the criteria we listed above. In this example we want Thunderbird to Move Message to...
  2. The second drop-down list shows all of the folders and subfolders (and subsubfolders...) you've created. We'll choose ManySpam.
  3. If we wanted Thunderbird to do something more than one action, we'd click on the plus sign and a second row of actions would appear.
  4. Click OK to close the Filter Rules dialog box.
  5. Click OK to close the Message Filters dialog box.

All enabled filters are applied to all new messages. To apply filters to existing messages, highlight the folder you want filtered, then from Thunderbird's Tools menu select Run Filters on Folder. All messages in the folder you selected along with all subfolders (and subsubfolders) will be checked, and the appropriate actions taken.

See our Sample Filters page for the filters you might create for each of the other examples given at the top of this page.

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Last updated: May 23, 2007