Draft emails Pop3 linux

[robbyx]

What is the best way to allow TB to deal with interim and draft emails?

Where should I have them saved with TB so that they are auto deleted when the final email is sent?

At present I am having both the original and the drafts retained and found on a search, even after the finalised version is sent.

[tanstaafl]

You can create message filters that get automatically run when a message is sent. It's not obvious how to use that feature to automatically delete the associated draft since its in a different folder. You might be able to do that if you install the Filtaquilla add-on that adds many features to message filters. I suggest you configure the drafts folder to automatically delete any messages in it that are older than X days instead.

See the Folder-specific settings section in http://kb.mozillazine.org/Message_aging

What do you mean by interim messages? I normally have one or more drafts of a message in the drafts folder, plus a copy of the sent message in the sent folder.

[robbyx]

The interim drafts is the name for my folder to store auto save drafts. I also have another drafts folder which gets emails saved manually as drafts.. How have you set up yours? Do the auto saved drafts together with manually saved drafts all go into the same drafts folder?

[tanstaafl]

I use just the Drafts folder.

I am not prompted for a location when I use Save -> Draft, Save, File -> Save or File -> Save as -> Draft. How are you telling it to save the draft in a different folder (instead of the Drafts folder specified in tools -> account settings -> account_name -> copies & folders)? I assume you're not doing this by selecting a different account in the folder pane before pressing the Write button. That would just use a different accounts Draft folder setting, not let you explicitly specify what folder to save it in.

[robbyx]

I set up the draft locations in the account settings --copies and folders---drafts and templates

[tanstaafl]

Do you mean that you save a draft in a different folder by saving it as a template instead?

My main issue when saving a draft is whether its a draft that I will work on and off over several days and want to make certain I don't accidentally delete it if I get rid of old drafts of other messages in the Drafts folder. That doesn't occur often, but when it does I found it easier to write the message in Notepad++ instead and copy & paste it into the compose message window when I'm eventually ready to send it. If I'm going to work on a message that much it's nice to use a better editor than the built-in editor in Thunderbird.

If you want to use another editor to write a message and don't need to save drafts in a Thunderbird folder I suggest you try the external editor add-on. Once you've configured it you press Write, enter the recipient/subject and if you want to use an external editor press a button on the toolbar. You then edit the message in the other editor, save the results, close the other editor, and that copies the contents into the compose message window. So you just need to press the Send button. I'd be wary of using it with Microsoft Word (due to formatting issues and non-standard HTML tags etc.), but it should work fine with most text or HTML editors.

http://globs.org/articles.php?lng=en&pg=2 (home page for add-on, but don't use its download link)
https://github.com/exteditor/exteditor/releases (use the v1.0.2 release, earlier ones don't work with TB 52.*)
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ (Notepad++)

[robbyx]

Do you mean that you save a draft in a different folder by saving it as a template instead?
No. I was using "Keep auto save drafts in " and setting it to save to a different folder from the Drafts folder.

Since your comment I have changed so that both draft messages and auto save drafts are stored in the same draft folder. I hope that works better.

Thanks for the comment about an external editor addon.