I use gmail for my personal email and really like how it keeps all email strings threaded in a single “conversation.” This feature really cuts down on the inbox clutter and is easily the biggest advance I’ve seen in any email client in a long time.  Well okay, a few other clients have this feature but Gmail is the only one that uses it well, by default, actually making it useful.

At work, I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird to talk to exchange (lack of calendaring yes, that’s another topic). The new division I’m working in generates TONS of email.  I average about 150/day. With the old standard non-threaded viewing of your inbox I find myself constantly scrolling around, re-grouping, re-sorting email to sift through email strings as not to miss any information – a total pain!

I finally spent some time to search for a solution… and found the Threadbubble add-on.  This simply enables threaded viewing in Thunderbird very similar to Gmail.  Awesome!

Upon further reading, I stumbled across the silly fact that this add-on is absolutely NOT necessary as Thunderbird already has threaded viewing capability, its just turned off by default.  The dumb thing is that its not exposed as an option – at least not easy to find.

The solution: Use Threadbubble.  Or, open up Thunderbird preferences(linux)/options(windoz), go to Advanced –> Config Editor.  Scroll down and look for “mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads” and change its default value to TRUE.  Restart Thunderbird, and bam!  However, the one thing you get out of Threadbubble add-on, is that it will “bubble” up threads to the top if sorted by Date.

I also read that threaded viewing will be the default behavior (or at least an option) whenever Thunderbird 3.x comes out.

The only quirky thing, is that sorting via the column headers can muck up the odering with threads… in my case I like having the newest thread always at the top… if I get the view mucked up, I use the View –> Sort by –> Date, then turn on threading again to get it how I like it.

Cheers, -e