I want to be able to browse to a folder in Thunderbird, and, when I open it, view the email in that folder filtered by date order (newest at the top), by thread (oldest at the end of the chain), with threads expanded.

Using Thunderbird’s View menu, I can do this per folder, but I could not find a way to set it by default.

Here is an approach which works, but it is a bit convoluted.

• Pick a folder (any folder, as long as it contains multiple messages, with at leat one threaded chain)) as your “template” folder. (We will set up the view here first, and then apply it to other folders.)

• In the columns above the messages:

  • click the “Thread” column header, to toggle threads on.

  • click the “Date” column header, so that it has an upwards facing arrow, to put the newest threads/messages first.

  • press Shift + 8 (to get an *), to expand all threads.

• Hover your pointer over one of the column headers (e.g. Subject), and right-click.

• Scroll to the bottom of what could be a very long menu.

• Click “Apply current view to…” (or use the keyboard arrow keys and Enter, if that helps avoid accidentally clicking off the menu and having to start again).

• Click “Folder and its children”.

• Select the account to which you want to apply it.

• Select the top level folder to which you want to apply it (e.g. inbox, if you have your folders under your inbox or want to apply it to your inbox, or whatever you folder structure is).

• If you have folders under that, you’ll see a menu with the top level folder name at the top. Click that top level folder name at the top, to apply it to all the subfolders.

• Click “OK” in the “Apply Change” dialogue.

And that should work.

There is a strong chance that:

a) I’m the only one who wants to do this; or

b) Loads of people want to do this and I am missing some more obvious way of doing it.

But anyway.