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Tip: Getting Things Done Using Saved Searches in Thundebird 2

Getting Things Done (commonly abbreviated as GTD) is an action management method of The David Allen Company, and the title of the book by David Allen which describes the method. more...   You may also be interested to watch "Time Management" by Randy Pausch (November 2007).

Two articles inspired me to setup several saved search or virtual folders in the Thunderbird e-mail client:

The following sections show how I configured various saved search folders like Action, Next-Actions, Archive, Defer, Delete, Wait, Untagged and searches that refine some of these for several projects.


tags

Tags

Tools > Options > Display > Tags tab

Delete the existing tags, then define the following tags.

If you're having problems to get the tags to work, see below.

edit tags

Work and Personal

Even though work and personal items are categorized using the same tags, they can still be distinguished by means of properly chosen subject headings.

Example subjects

Note that David Allen merely uses the categories Projects and Someday/Maybe and several action lists that are organized by the context in which these actions can be performed. Example action contexts are @Agendas, @Anywhere, @Call, @Computer, @Errands, @Home, @Office, @Waiting. See Palm organizer - How David uses his, which is freely available from David Allen Company.

Saved Search Folders

The various saved searches are indicated by the magnifier glass on the screen shot of the folder pane of Thunderbird.

Simple Saved Searches

Compound Saved Searches

Use Match all of the following in the next searches.

Create Saved Search

  1. right-click on Inbox to open the context-menu
  2. select Search... to open the Search Messages dialog
  3. press Save as Search Folder to configure the saved search folder
  4. specify the name for the saved search folder
  5. configure the search criteria
  6. press OK to save the search

  1. right-click on Inbox to open the context-menu
  2. select Search... to open the Search Messages dialog
  3. press Save as Search Folder to configure the saved search folder
  4. specify the name for the saved search folder
  5. configure the search criteria
  6. press OK to save the search

  1. right-click on Inbox to open the context-menu
  2. select Search... to open the Search Messages dialog
  3. press Save as Search Folder to configure the saved search folder
  4. specify the name for the saved search folder
  5. configure the search criteria
  6. press OK to save the search

The following screen shots show several of the saved search property dialog screens.


Inbox-Wait


Inbox-Untagged


Inbox-Personal-Action


Solving problems with tags

With the imap server we use (Courier), the tags attached to the messages are stored on the server. I'm not sure if the tags are stored on the server with all systems, or that Thunderbird may store them locally if the server does not support tags.

Here is the top part of the file with tag information of my account.

moene@server:.../Maildir/courierimapkeywords$ less \:list
archive
NonJunk
action-required
defer
wait
delete
project

1184162809.28700_1.newton:0

The tags are created on the server when they are used for the first time and with the name then used. When you later change the display name of a tag, Thunderbird still uses the old name when talking to the server.

For example, in the Thunderbird configuration property with name mailnews.tags.action-required.tag and value Action, the server-side tagname is action-required, whereas the displayed name is Action

When I started to use the tags as discussed here, I have edited the :list file (which then was named _RAC85~P) to get the proper tag names in place.

Thunderbird stores its tag configuration in the file prefs.js. On windows, the full path of this file is like
C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\{profilename}\prefs.js

When you want to use tags on several client computers that use a certain e-mail account, those clients must use the same local tag configuration.

You can edit prefs.js via

Here is what you see with Thunderbird's config editor.


For further information, see:

GTD Links