How to change where Thunderbird saves your mail

I got a good one yesterday.  Someone asked me if you can change where Thunderbird saves your mailboxes.  Apparently, this user prefers to have his saved in an easy to find place so he can back it up along with his other documents and files.  After some hunting, I found this:

1. Open Thunderbird and go to Tools > Account Settings
2. Click on “Server Settings” under the account you want to modify
3. At the bottom of the windows, you’ll see a box under the name “Local Directory”.  Change this location to any folder you wish and that’s where Thunderbird will store your mailboxes from that point forward.

How to empty your trash automatically

So you’re like one of my co-workers and you never remember to empty your trash. That’s perfectly fine, until Thunderbird starts running a little pokey and then after a few weeks, this pokiness becomes unbearable. In reality, Thunderbird should be able to handle it, but either way, you threw it away, so there’s no reason to save it. So here’s what you do:

Open Thunderbird and go to Tools > Account Settings.

Under the name of your email account, go to Server Settings.

At the bottom of this page, you’ll see a checkbox labeled “Empty Trash on Exit”. Check that box and everytime you close Thunderbird, it will empty your trash for you. It doesn’t do floors or laundry, but there might be an extension…

How to subscribe to this blog using TBird

So you like my blog and you want all the latest articles to come in automatically in Thunderbird? That’s do-able, just follow these steps:

Open Thunderbird and go to Tools > Account Settings.

Click the Add Account button at the bottom of the window.

Choose the RSS News & Blogs option and click Continue.

You can choose to name the account, if you wish, (the default is News & Blogs) then click Continue.

Double check your account name and if it’s correct, click Done. At this point, Thunderbird will take you back to the Account Settings page.

Click on the name of the account you just mad (News & Blogs).

Click on the Manage Subscriptions button

Now, since you want to add my blog to your subscriptions, click the Add button at the bottom of the window.

This next little form asks for the blog feed. The feed url for this blog is: https://tbirdhowto.wordpress.com/feed/.   Cut and paste that address into the Feed Url field, and click OK. My blog name should appear in the Subscriptions window. If it does, close that window to return to the Account Settings page.

Now click OK to close the Account Settings page.

You should see in your folder pane, at the top, a new folder called News & Blogs (or whatever you named it). If you click on the arrow (or plus for Windows) next to the name, it will show you the blog feed name. Click on that, and it will show you all the articles that Thunderbird downloaded from the blog. Keep reading if you’d like details about what you just setup.

How to add a signature

So you want to add a signature at the bottom of every right? No problem! First, open a text editor, for Mac that would be TextEdit, for Windows that would be NotePad. First, make sure the document is plain text – in TextEdit, go to Format > Make Plain Text; you’re already set up for this in NotePad.

In this new, plain-text document, make your signature. You can have whatever you want in this signature, including HTML for links, etc. When you finish making your signature, save it somewhere convenient and with a name that’s easy to remember; mine is emailsig.txt.

Next, open Thunderbird and go to Tools > Account Settings. Click on the name of the account that you want to add the signature to and check the box next to “Attach this signature”. There is a box below that checkbox where you put the path to the file you just made in TextEdit/Notepad. The easiest way to do that is to use the Choose button and go hunt for it. So click on the Choose button at the far right end of that blank box and it will open a mini-Finder/Explorer window. Find the signature file you made earlier and click OK. That fills in the path for you.

You should be good to go. You can test drive your new signature by opening a new email. Your signature should be at the bottom. If it doesn’t look the way you wanted it to look, open the text file you made earlier and edit it. You are able to edit the signature at the bottom of the email, of course, but it will be wrong on every email if you don’t fix it in the text file.

How to Reply Above a Quoted Message

Some things just bug me. One of them is when I have to scroll to the bottom of a mesasge to see what someone wrote. Unfortunately, this is the defaul setting in Thunderbird for how to reply to someone’s message. To change that, and stop driving me crazy, here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to Tools > Account Settings.
2. Under the account you want to change, go to the Composition& Addressing section.
3. The second checkbox says “Automatically quote the original message when replying” and has a drop menu underneath it. Change that menu to say “start my reply above the quote”.

This will put your response above someone’s email rather than below. If you prefer the other setting, then God help you cause you drive me crazy.

How to change how often TB checks for new mail

The default setting for Thunderbird to check for new mail is 10 minutes. Some people prefer to get it more often than that (I know I do). To change this setting, go to Tools > Account Settings. This will open the Account Settings options. From here, click on the “Server Settings” option listed under the email account for which you want to change the time. The second section, labeled Server Settings, has the setting for “Check for new messages every _ minutes”. Change that number to whatever you want and presto!