I’ve been using Thunderbird exclusively on my personal laptop for probably a couple of years now. I’m a wavering anti-Microsoft guy who generally uses Open Source solutions when they are good, and fall back to Microsoft when I can’t find a good alternative. With Thunderbird, I am sold.  I have not missed Outlook one bit.

Amazingly though, I’ve not been one to use quick keystrokes to accomplish simple tasks in Thunderbird until just last week.  Now I’m a use Thunderbird with mouse in right hand (I’m left handed — go figure), and left hand on the keyboard.  When I come in to see a nice nights worth of emails I now can scan through and clean up in just a matter of minutes. No, these keystrokes are not magic, and yes, I am an idiot for not seeing them sooner.  But nonetheless, here are my new found gems to use in the email list panel.  Instead of right clicking a message or group of messages and clicking on the desired contextual menu option, just highlight the message of choice, and press one of these keys (not an all inclusive list — just the ones I like), and your message is handled:

• J = junk (presto gone-Oh)
• M = mark as read (especially useful for a large group of messages that you want to keep but not have show up as unread)
• Shift-J = not junk (for finding the straggler messages that got marked as junk)
• Shift-M = mark as unread (for keeping the important message that you want to spend more time on highlighted)
• Ctrl-R = reply (I know you can click just as quick, but once you get used to using your digits, this is habit forming)

Oh yes, there are tons more.  And yes, any moron with a brain can look at the menus to find these.  But I just get so used to point-click that I often forget that sometimes a simple finger press on the keyboard is just as productive.