353209 - Enhancement: Smart folders

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Kim]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060821 Firefox/2.0b2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060821 Firefox/2.0b2

It should be possible to create smart folders where specific messages appear, without actually being moved.
Something like in Itunes where you can create smart playlists containing songs based on search criteria. When a new song is added to the library the relevant playlists are updated automatically and the song appear in every relevant playlist.
Similar, the smart folders should contain (links to) mail messages fulfilling certain criterias.
When a new message arrive Thunderbird could automatically ask if I want to create a smart mailinglist for mails from that person/domain.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a

Actual Results:  
n/a

Expected Results:  
n/a

Benefit:
Quite often I want a mail to be in several folders so it is difficult to decide if I should sort based on sender or on subject. With the smart folders I could sort on both because each mail can appear in several folders.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

This feature is already in place, altho perhaps not in exactly the way you intend.  You can create "virtual" folders based on a search.  Using the MailView (dropdown at the top of the thread pane), select Customize, create the search you want, and view it.  Then from the same dropdown, select Save View as Folder.  You can edit the search folder to search over multiple other folders.

In 2.0, you'll also be able to define any number of tags, and you could then create a folder for each particular tag.  Then simply tagging a message causes it to appear in the corresponding search folder.