by Nik Rawlinson
What you need: Mozilla Thunderbird Time required: One hour
Thunderbird has just been updated – and we like what we see. Version 115 of the free email client, which you can download from www.snipca. com/47173, has a fresh new look and logo (pictured above right).
The tabs of its old interface are still there, but you can hide them if you only have one component open. There’s also a column of icons that switch between email, calendar, address book and more; a handy search box in the title bar; and a discreet menu that saves you picking your way through the full menu bar.
It’s not just redesign for design’s sake, though, as there are other changes that will make an appreciable difference to the way you manage your email. Chief among them is the new tags filter, which lets you more quickly identify particular messages.
Say, for example, you want to tag every security alert you receive as ‘Important’. You can apply that particular tag to a message simply by pressing 1 when the message is open. You can apply a tag for Work, Personal, To-do or Later, by pressing 2, 3, 4 or 5 respectively.
Tags themselves aren’t a new feature, but the ‘tags folder’ mode is. This lets you quickly isolate messages that have a specific tag. You’ll find it by clicking the three dots at the top of the mail module’s sidebar, to the right of the New Message button ( 1 in our screenshot left), hovering over ‘Folder modes’ 2 then clicking Tags 3 . A new panel then appears in the sidebar showing your defined tags 4 . When you click one of these tags, only messages carrying that tag will be shown in the inbox.
Even if you’re only using the default tags and the five preset shortcuts, this is a quick and easy way to focus on work messages during the day, personal messages at home, or emails you’ve not had time to deal with earlier.
And, if the default tags don’t fit the way you work with Thunderbird, you can change them. To do so, click the three-lines button again, then Settings. Click ‘General’ in the sidebar ( 1 in our screenshot above), then scroll down to Tags in the window’s main pane and click Edit 2 .
Some features we’d really like to see still aren’t included, but you can add these by installing add-ons. Here, we’ll look at three must-have add-ons: ‘Attach from Clipboard’, Mail Merge and Send Later.
1 Install Thunderbird add-ons
We’ve provided direct links to each of the add-ons we’ll be looking at but, if you want to install any others, start by searching at www.snipca.com/46935. When you find an add-on you
