Thunderbird should be able to show new message alerts selectively

[Robert Persson]

Binary package hint: thunderbird

Currently Thunderbird's new-message alerts/sounds feature is an all or nothing option. This means that if, say, I want to know if I have received a message from a friend in the inbox of the account I reserve for personal mail, I will also be alerted every time I receive a mail from every mailing list, newsletter, etc that I subscribe to. Such constant and irrelevant interruptions are unacceptable, thus rendering the new message alert feature useless.

A much better system would be to allow the user to request alerts only from specified mailboxes on specified mail accounts.

Even better would be to allow the user to request alerts only on receipt of messages from a particular address, so that if you anxiously awaiting a reply from your aunt or from the executor of the estate of the late President Mobutu of the former Zaïre, you could be a little less anxious. Perhaps a feature like this would be better as a plugin...

[Robert Persson (ireneshusband)]

I've just discovered that there is an addon which will allow you to specify notifications by account and mailbox, and which seems to work fine, called "mailbox alert". That said, most computer users I know would never think of searching for and installing obscure addon. So even though this is a fairly good solution to the problem, it is not ideal.

[Kathryn Killebrew (kathryn-killebrew)]

+1

I would like to see an option to selectively remove junk and newsletter folders from notification through the General Preferences tab.

[Thomas Hotz (thotz-deactivatedaccount)]

Maybe you report this bug directly at Mozillas bugtracker. Thank you!