r/Thunderbird • u/No-Confidence-9191 • 2d ago

Desktop Help Automatically open previous sessions opened mails on startup?

I receive dozens of mails a day and usually keep several of them open through some days until I get to work on them. In Outlook I always get the pop up message on start up whether I want to reopen them when I restart Outlook after starting the pc on the next day.

Is such a thing possible with Thunderbird? Best would be for me to simply open them, ignore them, have them "survive" shut downs of the PC and still be opened on next and overnext etc. startup without even being asked.

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u/Un_Ballerina_1952 1d ago

Do you open them in new tabs or what? I recall that my open email tabs survive shutdown/restart (though I do that rarely.)

1

u/No-Confidence-9191 1d ago

Yes, so they are popping out in their own little window, like in Outlook, but after testing, they dont re-open on a fresh start.

1

u/Un_Ballerina_1952 1d ago

I've never seen emails open in their own window. When I double-click on a message, it opens in a new tab in the Thunderbird window. (Thunderbird 154.0 on Ubuntu Linux)

1

u/No-Confidence-9191 1d ago

I could change this in the settings. I dont know the version or anything, just used the normal download today from the website. So the latest I guess for windows.

1

u/wsmwk Thunderbird Employee 1d ago

> In Outlook I always get the pop up message on start up whether I want to reopen them.

No, there will never be a prompt

And message windows do not reopen on startup, only message tabs. You can change this in settings.

A suggestion - tabs can be lost if your Thunderbird crashes or gets hung, because the tab state is only saved on a successful shutdown. What I do instead is
1) in Settings messages is set to not automatically be marked as read (disable automatic mark messages as read)
2) messages which need my attention are marked as important ("1" on the keyboard) and unread,
3) messages for which I am waiting a response are marked important and changed to read

You can then query using quick filter or virtual folders which messages still need your attention and which are waiting for a response.

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u/No-Confidence-9191 1d ago

Thank you for your reply and indepth guide. It is not quite what I was hoping for but I will check it out.

1

u/TheRealLazloFalconi 1d ago

There really are as many wrong ways to do things as there are people.

I'm kidding of course, if it works for you, it works.