Unified Folders in Thunderbird

When I decided to leave Google Apps for Rackspace Email for a couple of my domains, I switched from a webmail user to an IMAP user. I set up the new email accounts in Outlook and within hours decided to remove them. Because Outlook pretty much sucks I decided to use Thunderbird as my IMAP client at work. There was one thing that wasn’t working correctly, one of the things I liked most about Thunderbird, unified folders.

I love that you can have a unified inbox but for some reason my copy of Thunderbird was only showing me the contents of one inbox. After a quick Google search I was able to find the solution. If you are experiencing the same issue, simply follow these instructions.

1. Launch Thunderbird and right click on your unified inbox folder and click properties.

2. Click on Choose for which folders Thunderbird should search for the unified inbox.

3. Select which IMAP folders should be included in the unified folder. In this case, I’m going to choose all Inbox folders.

4. Click OK to save the choices, then OK to exit out of the folder properties. Your unified inbox should now be working (you may need to restart Thunderbird to see the changes).

Of course, this can be done with any folder that you want to make unified (unified sent folders or draft folders, for example), you would just need to select the IMAP folders you want to include the same way as we did the Inboxes.

3 replies
  1. PappaBravo
    PappaBravo says:

    I have the same problem, but in my version of Thunderbird (the latest) I don’t get the same screen as shown in the screenshot. Has it been changed in the newer version?

  2. shep
    shep says:

    honestly, i’m not sure. I switched to Postbox a while back. It’s built on top of Thunderbird but offers a bunch of features that Thunderbird doesn’t offer (and looks nicer too).

  3. 2pair
    2pair says:

    Thanks so much for this! I was going crazy trying to figure out why all but one of my inboxes were being aggregated. Also, in response to PappaBravo, I’m using the latest version of Thunderbird on a mac and the window was approximately the same. Perhaps you may have accidentally clicked on one of the inboxes below it.

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