Smart Inbox — Prioritized & Categorized Email View for Thunderbird

[tfranzo]

💡 Idea
Add a Smart Inbox to Thunderbird that automatically prioritizes and categorizes incoming emails, helping users focus on what matters most while reducing email overload.

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🧠 How it works
The Smart Inbox analyzes incoming messages (locally) and intelligently sorts them using a mix of heuristics and optional on-device AI. Messages are grouped and highlighted based on:

• 📌 Importance – Frequent contacts, flagged items, or work-related senders get top visibility.

• 🏷️ Category – Auto-labeled into Personal, Work, Promotions, Social, Newsletters, etc.

• 📄 Summaries – Long messages can show an AI-generated preview to save reading time.

• 🔕 Custom notifications – Be alerted only for emails you really care about.

• 🧠 Smart filters – Toggle between “Important only”, “Unread”, or “Newsletters later” in one click.

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🛠️ Optional features

• Feedback loop: Users can reclassify or mark/unmark priority messages to help Thunderbird improve sorting.

• “Reply later” and “Snooze” per category or sender.

• Quick actions: e.g., “Archive all promos”, “Mute social threads”.

• “Unread important” inbox view.

• “You haven’t replied to this contact in 3 days” gentle nudges.

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✅ Benefits

• Declutters the inbox and makes daily email triage faster.

• Reduces stress and mental fatigue (especially for busy users).

• Encourages healthy, consistent email habits.

• Gives Thunderbird a modern, Gmail-like experience — while remaining lightweight and private.

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🔐 Privacy & Open Source Alignment All processing happens locally on the user’s device — no email content is shared or analyzed in the cloud.
Everything is fully aligned with Thunderbird’s open-source philosophy, respecting user privacy, transparency, and control. The feature would be optional and 100% customizable.

[Jon]

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