Hi Ludvig

If POP mail account - emails are stored in mbox files. One mbox file is shown in the Folder Pane as a folder. In effect you have got 22000 emails written one after the other in a single mbox text FILE.

If that file gets corrupted you stand to lose a lot of emails. So hopefully you have got good regular backups of that mbox file. Same goes for the Sent folder. Ideally it's just as simple to backup the entire profile name folder, so backing up all mail accounts, address books and preferences etc in one go.

Ideally, you would create suitably named folders and move emails upon reading, so they are organised, thus creating smaller folders.

Compacting: When you select to delete an email, it is marked as deleted and hidden from the Inbox view and reappears in the 'Trash/Deleted' folder. In reality it is still in Inbox. Compacting - this removes the 'marked as deleted' emails thus creating space. So, if there are no marked as deleted emails, then compacting will have no effect.

If people responded to an email you sent, it is possible they used the 'Reply' option. This would show up in Inbox with a 'Re:' in the Subject. You can see if there is a 'Conversation' - various 'Replies'. right click on Sent email and select 'Open message in Conversation' This will show all emails that are threaded for that conversation, both sent and received. So you could see who responded or not allowing you to act as required - eg: create reminder email. This is a one at a time method of dealing with an email, checking and responding immediately as needed.

Another useful thing would be to 'Tag' a sent email. You can create your own Tags. Once you get a reply, Tag the sent email with eg: 'Got Reply'.

To see what has got that Tag, enable the Column header 'Tag'. Then sort by Tags, by clicking on the Tag column header, click again to reverse the sort if required. All of those without tags will also be grouped, so instantly showing you which you have not tagged with a 'Got Reply'. Or maybe Tag sent emails with 'Follow up' after sending.

If you have particular clients which you communicate on a more regular basis, they could be given their own Folder. So have a think about how you would organise emails. EG: by Topic, Product, Client,

You could store both Sent and Received emails in the same folder, which might be useful for folders of individual clients.

eg: In Inbox use Sort by 'From' to collate all emails from a particular person, highlight them and move all hightlighted emails in one go to the newly created folder. This sort of orgainising does not take very long, but has many benefits.

This is all about devising a working system to suit your work needs as at the moment it would seem you have not devised any type of filing system. It would be to your advantage to treat Thunderbird like an office with a virtual filing cabinet and not just one huge in-tray for everything you ever receive.

re : I don't have time to sort or clean up among my e-mail You are going to get more and more emails, so I feel you need to come up with some Folder structure to organise your work as it will only get more complicated and in the end waste your valuable time in performing loads of searching and getting frustrated.

Useful manual - slightly dated but still has all the essential stuff. This page is about tags.

• http://en.flossmanuals.net/thunderbird/tagging-and-marking/

Keep it working: very good advice on how to maintain Thunderbird

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_(Thunderbird)

Backup:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup

Compacting:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders

Hallo!

Thanks for a long answer! It seem like the answer was mostly a lecture in how it is useful to sort and organize my e-mail into folders. In my role as a start-up CEO with the amount of incoming and outgoing e-mail it is just not worth the time and effort to sort and flag. I usually find the information I need in old e-mails just by searching or filtering in my very huge inbox.

So back to the question: Is there any way to automatically filter out all the e-mails in my "sent" folder that did never get a reply? If I could list these in the view, just sorted by sent date it would be very helpful.

BTW, Google Mail is using IMAP and not POP.

Best,

Ludvig

If you have sent one email with the same 'Subject' sent to several people, you can search on 'Subject' . It will list all responses of same Subject, so you could then see who had replied, thus the logic if not in list then you've not had a responses.

Also I mentioned using the right click 'Open in conversation. This should also produce all those who responded shown as threads; assuming they used 'Reply'. Again this would tell you who had replied and therefore by logic those who had not. Threads on an email will only show both sent and received in either Open in Converation on a particular sent email or if folders have both sent and received in them (hence why I mentioned the folders idea; it being useful in certain cases)

The problem with the above search options is that it is done on a case by case basis using the only common element between what you sent and receive on a particular email. You are also reliant on the responder using 'Reply' and not altering the Subject. So leaving you to work through emails, seeing who has reponded and then cross-checking with who was sent the email. These methods work, but rather time consuming.

If you used/started using Tags as suggested or even 'starred' those that got a response you would be creating a 'common field' you could search on eg: Tags or Starred. That was why I suggested using that method as it would offer you easy searches, both in a folder and globally. Whilst this might be an issue until you start applying something you can search easily on, it would help in all future cases.

This would require you to tag or star as you work to create the required common element you can search on. eg: Tags contain Follow-up then all Sent emails with that tag have not had a response.

When you get a response you remove the 'Follow-up' tag and add 'Got Reply' or whatever tag name you want. thus keeping the parameters up to date to assist with continued ability to use that type of search on an entire folder.

The point I was making is currently you have not set up a common denominator to globally search on. A folder of 210000 sent emails has no idea whether there is no response as there is no 'common field' for searching eg: a Tag or Star, so you are left with searching on a per email eg: Subject or email address.

So not a lecture, but it contained several methods of searching and also how to improve or speed up locating those messages.