I use Thunderbird for my work emails. It works pretty well except there is one thing that troubles me for a long time. I have several IMAP shared folder on my account. Thunderbird does not check the new messages on these folders. I had to manually click on these folders to check. This is very inconvenient and I have missed some time sensitive emails because I forgot to check them.

I decided to find a solution this morning. To my surprise, the solution is simple and no plugin is required. My problem is due to my ignorance of the features that Thunderbird supports. By default, Thunderbird doesn’t automatically check for new messages on the folders, you have to configure it by yourself. Right click on a folder of your choice and select Properties. Make sure the box Check this folder for new messages is checked.

Click on OK to close the dialog. Afterward, Thunderbird checks the folder for new messages without manual intervention.

The first time you start up Thunderbird, you notice that it’s indexing your emails and feeds. If you do not think indexing is going to do you any good. You can disable it.

1. Click on Tools -> Options….
2. Click on Advanced and uncheck Enable Global Search and Indexer.
   
3. Click on OK to close the dialog

One feature of Thunderbird that I use less often is the address book. The only thing I did was to set up the address book to get the user information from our LDAP server and that’s it. One user came to me and asked about how to configure the address book so that more information can be retrieved from the LDAP server. It took me a short while to find the information to set it up.

If you look at a card in the address book, there is a third tab Other. Four custom fields are in this tab. You can configure the mapping between LDAP attributes and these fields. Follow these steps to set it up.

1. Click on Tools -> Options.
2. Click on Advanced and click on General tab.
3. Click on Config Editor button.
4. Enter attrmap in the Filter box. The 4 preference names start with ldap_2.servers.default.attrmap.Custom are the corresponding preferences that you can change. Doble click on the preference to change it. In this example, I mapped the UserID to the custom field 1.
   
5. Restart Thunderbird when you are done.
6. Search for a user in the LDAP address book and you can see the UserID is shown in the Custom 1 field now.