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Sometimes you sent people an email and remove the issue from your mind but they never answer it.

Is it possible to identify such mails in an easy way? For example by some kind of search folder?

It is okay if such a mail must be tagged as "to be tracked" so that not all emails require an answer.

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5 Answers

If you send an important email, then go to the Sent folder and hit the 1 key with the email highlighted. This will tag it as Important.

  1. Create a search folder by right-clicking the Sent folder and choosing Search, then at the bottom choose Save as Search Folder

  2. Give the folder a good name "Sent Important", and create as a sub-folder of whatever makes sense to you.

  3. Click the Choose.. button and confirm that only the Sent folder is ticked.

  4. Change the first drop-down to read Tags, and make sure the condition is "Important".

  5. Click Create.

Now you will have a folder containing all your important Sent items. If you want to mark one as dealt with, you just hit 1 on it again, which will remove the important tag.

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Perhaps the Follow Up add-on may help :

This extension provides a 'Follow-Up' toolbar. When a user is unable to reply to an email at a time and wants to follow up on it later, all he needs to do is click on the follow up button. A dialog box pops up asking for a date for which the user wants to add a follow up reminder for. The user enters a date and clicks on the button. That's all the user needs to do.

The extension requires at a minimum Thunderbird version 3.1 which I don't use, so I can't test if it is suitable for your needs.


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up vote 0 down vote accepted

I found the Thunderbird remindIt plugin.

From the send button you can open the dropdown and puss "send and remind". It will automatically tag the mail in the sent folder with a RemindIt.Pending tag. When somebody answers the mail, the tag is automatically removed.

So far that is absolutely what I need.

There is a reminder text to be configured, so it looks like it will re-send the mail with a reminder text after an also configurable reminder timespan. In my tests I could not see this function.

But what happens is, that the tag of messages that were not answered changes to RemindIt.Expired so you can make a search folder based on this tag to see which mails need answer.

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Couldn't automatic resend without human control be potentially embarrassing in some situations? –  harrymc Feb 27 '12 at 20:40
Yes. What I haven in mind would be that it automatically opens a re-send mail and I just press send. But I could not get any kind of reminder sending to work. The only thing I see is that some reminder text can be set, but I have no clue where it is used. –  Alex Feb 27 '12 at 20:54
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Any work must be done at Your side.

There are no perfect tools for "email recievers side". Solution listed below by Paul with marking important mails looks most efficient.

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Right-click on the email that may require follow-up and select Convert To >> TASK. From here you can set the reminder interval, i.e. 15 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc..

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