After checking the Internet for a ready-made tutorial on how to do this, everything I found made this task more difficult than it needs to be. So—here’s a simple way to create filters within Mozilla Thunderbird to automatically filter your messages into folders in your email account.
This shows Thunderbird on my computer with an email from Amazon high-lighted in green. Suppose I wanted emails from Amazon to automatically be thrown into a new folder called Amazon, so I can more easily distinguish those emails from all the rest. Easy.
To start, right-click on the email account you want to do this in—for my case, it’s called IDLLC—and then select New Folder.
A box will pop up where you can name the folder. In our case, we want to name the new folder Amazon.
I will now have a new folder called Amazon located under my IDLLC email account.
Here is where we set up our filter, and do so more easily than the other tutorials I’ve found. Since I want all emails I receive from Amazon to be routed into my new Amazon folder, I’m going to select options to make this happen. To begin, I click a typical email from Amazon, such as is seen above. Note that below, in the body of the email, you can see the From field (circled in red above) shows this email is from amazon.com.
All email from Amazon will have this same feature, even though what appears before the @ symbol will vary. So we’ll use this fact to create our filter. To start, right-click on the email address this email is from and select Create Filter From…
This will open up a new box where we can specify what we want the filter to do:
Note that I want the filter to match the “contains” field, that contains “amazon.com” and then to move the message to the Amazon folder in my IDLLC email account. After checking this is all correct, click OK to create the filter. You don’t have to name the filter unless you want to—a name will be assigned automatically by Thunderbird that tends to make sense most of the time.
To activate this filter on my Inbox, I’ll next tell the filter to Run Now:
Thunderbird will now filter all emails in my inbox that contain amazon.com in the From field, and move them into my Amazon folder. We can verify this by looking inside the Amazon folder:
In my case, this cleared 182 messages from Amazon from my inbox and placed them into my Amazon folder, including three messages I haven’t yet read.
To create additional filters, follow the same steps. You can even create multiple filters for the same folder, including filters that automatically move messages to the Trash or Junk or whatever else you may want. Simple, right?
And the good thing is these filters will work automatically in the future whenever new email comes into your inbox—you don’t have to keep running these filters manually (unless you specifically set them to be manually run).