How to put links in your messages

The most beautiful (and useful) part of the Internet is linking. Every picture, document, and file on the Internet can be linked to each other so you literally have a “web”, thus the name… Linking inside an email gives us the convenience of showing someone where to find a particular something, whether it’s a picture of junior, an interesting news article, or that funny video (or not-so-funny video) on Youtube. Including a link in an email using Thunderbird is fairly simple, try this:

1. Go to your web browser and copy the URL (the address) of the thing you want to link to
2. Open Thunderbird
3. Click the Write button
4. Type out your message
5. Highlight the word you want to use as the link
6. Create the Link. There are two ways of doing this:
   1. Go to Insert > Link
   2. Click on the Page Icon on the formatting toolbar and choose Link
7. Paste your URL (from step 1) into the Link Location field and click OK
8. This will create the link!

Your link should be created and you can either finish typing your message or send it on its way. There is one thing to look out for though, make sure your recipient can get HTML messages. Linking only works for HTML messages and if your recipient only does plain text messages, they will only see the long URL instead of a link.

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How to format strike through text

I recently received an email from a reader asking about how to get text that has a strike through it. Luckily, Thunderbird already has this ability built into its formatting options. Here’s the easiest way to set this up:

1. Type out some text
2. Select the text you want formatted with the strike through
3. Go to Format > Text Style > Strikethrough

There is a second way, which involves editing HTML code, a.k.a the language that all websites use and allows us to put pictures, links, and all kinds of cool things into our emails. The <strike> </strike> tag shows text with the strike through it, just put your text in between the two tags. Of course, this way isn’t as easy as the first, so I would recommend the built-in way.

As far as I know, the built-in method should work, even if the person doesn’t use HTML formatted messages.

How to thread (or unthread) messages

Someone recently approached me and asked about an odd behavior with their Inbox. Apparently messages that weren’t remotely related to each other were showing up grouped together and the user wanted to know if there was a way to stop this. Ends up, the user had turned on “threading” and unrelated emails were being grouped together as a thread. Threading is grouping messages together as if they are part of a single conversation. In essence, it’s a specialized type of sorting. If you have ever used Gmail, Google’s free webmail service, you’ll be very familiar with threading, since a message and your replies appear together as a “conversation”.

Threading is very useful if you’re working on several projects at once and you email people back and forth regarding those projects. Threading would keep the messages together so you can easily find the conversations without having to perform a search. Personally, I don’t keep lots of mail in my Inbox, so sorting by date works best for me.

If you want to have your messages threaded together, here’s how to turn on threading:

1. Open Thunderbird
2. Click on the folder you want to thread
3. Go to View > Sort By > Threaded

You’ll notice a slight change in your box headers as the thread column changes to an active state:

Currently, each folder can have separate threading preferences, so you could sort Project 1’s folder by threads, but not Project 2’s folder.

Turning Off Threading

If, by some chance, you have threading turned on (by accident or not), you can turn it off by:

1. Click on the folder that is threaded
2. Go to View > Sort By > Unthreaded

Viola, threading is turned off for that folder.

How to “unjunk” messages

You’re in a panic.  A whole batch of new messages just showed up, then disappeared from your Inbox.  You check the trash, they’re not there.  You check some of your saved messages folders, they’re not there.  You know one of them was important, but you don’t know where it is!  Calm down, everything’s going to be fine.  You’ve just experienced the magic of the Junk Mail Filter.  Until you’ve trained it to know what you think is or is not junk, it will continue to think lots of things are junk and do what you just described.  Here’s how to help the filter learn and retrieve your messages.

1. Go to your Junk folder.  Inside this folder, you will find a list of messages.  Some are probably “keepers” and others are ones you’d like to throw away.
2. Click on one of the “good” messages.  When you do this, it will show you the message, but at the top, there is a green section that says “Thunderbird thinks this message is junk” and a button labeled “This is Not Junk”.
3. Hit that button.  Unfortunately, hitting this button doesn’t magically put this message into your Inbox, so…
4. Drag the message back to your Inbox.
5. Repeat this process for the messages in the Junk folder that you would like to keep.

This is a small hassle, but it’s worth it to not have to read through a thousand ads for “male enhancement” or other solicitations for who knows what.  Keep training that filter and it will, eventually, start getting it right more often than it gets it wrong.

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 sort messages

So your friend Judy says she sent that important report to you already, but doesn’t remember exactly when and you’ve got to print it right away for the boss? You know it was an attachment on an email from Judy, but since your Inbox shows the newest emails first. This is a simple problem to solve. The solution: message sorting. The best part is, it doesn’t involve reprogramming Thunderbird and diving into the preferences or account settings.

When you’re looking at your Inbox, check out the line of boxes that are right above that most current email. The column headers tell you what you can expect to find in that column; things like Sender, Date, Subject, etc. The other thing those column headers do is allow you to sort messages by that header. You might notice that the Date column is blue instead of that silver/gray-ish color that the rest of the Thunderbird window. That tells you that the messages in that box are being sorted by Date.

To sort by a different header (like Sender in our story), click on that header. The first time you click, the messages will rearrange themselves in order A to Z by that header. Try clicking around on the different headers and notice the differences. From our story, we’d click on the Sender header, find all the messages with Judy all clumped together, then find our message with the report attachment.

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.