Let’s face it—if Tweedledum and Tweedledee had email accounts, they would likely manage their email quite differently (or contrarily). Luckily, Thunderbird allows you some degree of flexibility in how you can view and sort your email, which will please even the most discriminating email connoisseur. The View menu drop-down list and Grouped by Sort are two handy ways you can rapidly sort your mail in a variety of configurations.
Thunderbird has a “View” drop-down list that allows you to sort your email into various categories, including the “Unread” category, which is particularly useful if you are like me and skip through messages from previous days and then need to go back and find them quickly. You can view mail that you have labeled in the five categories that are set forth in the “Labeling and Marking Your Mail” section, as well as a few other default categories, including People I know, Recent Mail, Last 5 Days, Not Junk, and Has Attachments. Perhaps the best feature in this section is the ability to customize these existing views as well as create new ones. If you click the Customize button, you see the dialog box shown in Figure 12-9, which shows you the existing views that you can operate on.