Group accounts in Folder Pane (Mac)

[pwapwa]

Hi Team,

I would also like to group accounts. Yes I know one can achieve the same sort of thing with multiple profiles.
The reason I want to do it is that that I have my own accounts, my wife's email accounts and accounts for various businesses on my laptop so that when I travel they are all available. I would love to group them into say - Me, Spouse and Businesses so that from one screen I can hide the non-Me accounts most of teh time and expand them when needed.

I must admit, when one asks one of these questions on a forum, it is good to get a yes (+ here is how)/no answer rather than a continuing argument over an alternative solution - whatever its merits are.

Cheers,
Peter

[DanRaisch]

Note that I've split your post from its original as that thread died 10 years ago.

To help us understand the issues you seek to address, how many accounts are you dealing with in Me, Spouse, Businesses groups?

Not as a "solution" but so we know what you have considered: Have you looked into using the "Manually Sort Folders" extension ( https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/th ... t-folders/ ) which allows the user to choose the order in which accounts are displayed in the left hand Folder Pane?

[WaltS48]

In version 91 users can select multiple folder views using View > Folders.

You can also reorder accounts using Account Settings and dragging the accounts into the preferred order.

If you have version 91.1.0 you can use Shift and the arrow keys to reorder them.

[pwapwa]

Hi Team,

In response to your questions ...
I have three accounts (personal, general business and then spamable - i.e., the email address you use to register with Target, Costco etc, that receives a lifetime of marketing)
My spouse has the same number of accounts for herself.
We have a property businesses that has three email accounts (one for each rental property)
We have two other accounts for different businesses that we run.
Interestingly we also have several accounts were old tax and business emails are archived (I find that if one does not keep them up to date with email clients - then it is really difficult to access them when you want them). They are all imap accessed accounts.

Hence I would love to group the appropriate accounts under something like Spouse, Properties, Businesses, Archive and leave my three accounts ungrouped - and then collapse the groups when they are not in use.

------- Other notes that may be of interest to you -------

I used Thunderbird for years until it looked like it was going to be orphaned. I then switched to postbox (a commercially supported Thunderbird derivative as I understand it) - where this account grouping feature was available. I used it and really appreciated the ability to minimize 12+ accounts to a few lines in the accounts panel. I now think Thunderbird is superior to Postbox so am in the process of switching back to it. Thunderbird (and to a lesser extent - its derivatives) is the only reliable email client I could find that could handle multiple accounts reliably and efficiently that was also configurable - apart from Microsoft Outlook (lots of limitations) and Apple Mail (which is far less configurable and has many reliability quirks).

I have used the account reordering extension in version 78 (excellent tool) and have downloaded and started to dabble with version 91. Looks really good however I will probably wait until a version of 91 is available that upgrades version 78 before changing to it due to space requirements Many large email accounts).

I appreciate the following should be in a different threads in mozillazine - but I will put it here initially as we are sort of on the topic of improvements and being a recent returnee to Thunderbird I am noticing things that you may consider working on if they have not been addressed in version 91. Note that some of this is my ignorance because I have not read the manual - but I find "new" experienced user observations are often the most useful:

Initial Product Feedback:
1) I will have to read about the search function at the top of the main panel (in version 78) as its operation is not intuitive. I type in Marriott and it lists messages containing Marriott in a pop-up window. If I hit return it opens another tab - titled "Results for Marriott" but the page is empty. If I click on one of the initially listed messages in the pop-up - nothing seems to happen. The Edit->find->"Search Messages" function under find function is a lot more intuitive and does a superset of what I expect Search to do.

2) Activity Manager was almost useless for tracking copy tasks (copying large numbers of messages between folders). When a copy failed - one had no idea when / where / etc. Sometimes the copy task was not shown at all (the . Its been several weeks since I was doing large folder copies but the experience really was painful because it was unreliable. If I initiated multiple copies, I believe each one was on a separate asynchronous thread. As I remember - reports appeared (and sometimes didn't) at the bottom of the Thunderbird Panel. It was really hard to figure out the progress of each copy if more than one was running at once - the display was like watching subliminal advertising as each progress report flashed up for a few milliseconds before it was replaced by a report from the next thread. . Would be great to see a running total / progress in a separate panel - i.e., if there were four tasks running simultaneously each task gets its own line on the panel and one can see if it is still running and progress (message 34 of 4000 copied). By the way - Thunderbird is better than other tools for copying large numbers of messages between folders - but none of the email clients I tested was reliable. I just think would be fantastic if Thunderbird was rock solid in this area as it would be a significant advantageous differentiator for those that need this type of functionality.

3) I would be appreciate the opportunity to write extensions for Thunderbird in my spare time. If it was easy to figure out how to do it I would already be doing it. Have not looked yet - but if you could point me to relevant information (extension writer's user / reference guide) that would be appreciated.

4) The first three extensions I would write would include:
4.1) A bulletproof message copy. I changed email/web hosts and the new host did not successfully copy all emails from the original to their hosting service. Admittedly there were around 40GB of emails in each of three of the largest accounts which seemed to challenge their transfer process. I then went through manually identifying and copying the missing emails from the old account to the new one with mixed success. The biggest challenge was "Server Timeout" which killed the copy at a random location. I would love a bulletproof copy that detected the server timeout and recovered from it. This tool would also copy attachments. When it finished it would give a report of how many messages it successfully copied (including attachments), how many failed to copy and a savable list of the failures. The current copy mechanism is very unreliable because of server timeouts. Note that I did increase the timeout period considerably - but ultimately that did not end the problem.
4.2) A "compare two folders" (including from different accounts) that created a list of differences between messages in each account and whether all attachments were the same. This is related to teh problem listed above. (Try looking at two folders and figure out the differences and I think you will get the idea of the utility of such a function).
4.3) A (rock solid) Sync two folders extension. This is also related to the above two extensions.
4.4) Good reporting of the progress of when a new account is set up in Thunderbird for a large existing email account. The process appears to be
4.4.1) First copy the headers for all messages.
4.4.2) Next copy the message bodies
4.4.3) Copy attachments (maybe this is done in step 4.4.2 ? maybe not?
In any case, when one sets up multiple accounts (as when transferring from email clients from PostBox to Thunderbird and changing email hosts), all this happens with multiple accounts all at once - I am guessing as low priority background threads. One has no idea of what the progress of any particular account is - whether it finished - were there errors etc. This is important because only when one is confident the transfers and accurate and complete can one drop the old host and client.

Cheers,
Peter Arnold
303 88 40419

[DanRaisch]

Just to be sure that things are clear here...we are not Mozilla and (for the most part) are not the developers or maintainers of Thunderbird. As it says in the right hand column of this page, "mozillaZine is an independent Mozilla community and advocacy site. We're not affiliated or endorsed by the Mozilla Corporation"

[pwapwa]

Hi Dan,

Aha - that makes more sense. Apologies if my last post was misdirected as I thought this forum was a part of Mozilla.
1) If I wanted to get the relevant above-listed thoughts to Mozilla - how would you recommend that I do that most effectively?
2) If I wanted to write an extension - what is the best place to learn how to do that?
3) As for MozillaZine - glad you are here and I hope the Thunderbird team reads this blog as it is an exceptionally useful resource and source of customer feedback.

Cheers
Peter Arnold