I love Thunderbird, but as many other mail clients it does one thing utterly wrong: It organizes mails around IMAP folders, hence a technicality.
I think we should try a different way of looking at email: instead of folders, the main view should be organized around people.
Imagine you could select a contact and you see your whole conversation with them across all folders and accounts. Unread badges show who has written, mailing lists become groups, and senders who are not in your address book yet can be added with one click. The old folder view is always one click away. And this is how it could look like:
How it works
Contact Folders uses the contacts already in your address books. Pick a person, and you see everything you exchanged with them: their messages to you and your replies, threaded as conversations. It doesn't matter whether a message sits in the Inbox, an archive folder or Sent.
How it works
Contact Folders uses the contacts already in your address books. Pick a person, and you see everything you exchanged with them: their messages to you and your replies, threaded as conversations. It doesn't matter whether a message sits in the Inbox, an archive folder or Sent.
- People, not folders. Contacts are sorted by your most recent exchange, so the people you're talking to right now are always at the top. Unread badges show where new mail is waiting.
- All contacts. The entry at the top shows all your mail at once, labelled with who it's from or who you wrote to.
- Groups. Mailing lists from your address book appear as groups, right among your contacts: like a chat, a group moves up when there's new mail and sinks when it's quiet. Selecting one shows the combined conversation with all members.
- Group conversations. Like a group chat: when you write with several people in one thread, they appear together as a group, even if you never saved them as a list. Everyone who took part in the thread belongs to it, blind copies excepted.
- New people, one click. Someone who isn't in your address book yet still gets an entry, whether they wrote to you or you wrote to them. Click + and Thunderbird's contact editor opens with their name and address filled in.
- Everything else stays Thunderbird. The message list, the reader, replying, filters, search and keyboard shortcuts are Thunderbird's own. The folder icon next to the search field (or the Contacts button in the toolbar) switches back to your folders at any time.
Back in the days when time was not a factor and the sound of an incoming mail was still a thrill, I achieved something like this by adding a folder for each contact and defining redirect rules. But this was only a hack. Now I build a proof of concept as an extension and I would love to hear from you. Is this handy for you too?
https://gitlab.com/gunwald/contact-folders
