While our Mozilla Mail tutorial focuses on Windows, keep in mind that Mozilla Mail is a "cross-platform" email client: it runs and operates the same way on Windows, Apple's Mac OS X and Linux. The Mozilla Foundation also offers the standalone Thunderbird email client: see the Mozilla Thunderbird Tutorial

Using Folders & Labels to Manage Your Emails

Email is great fun, but can be overwhelming at times. Depending on how many "free newsletters" you subscribe to, only two days of inattention will make your inbox seem discouragingly crowded.

Fortunately, Mozilla Mail has several features to help you cope with the flow of mail.

Organizing Your Emails with Folders

The easiest, and most intuitive way to organize your emails is to use folders.

To create a new folder, right-click on the "Local Folders" label and choose New Folder. (Similarly, to create a sub-folder, right-click on a folder and chose New Subfolder.)

To move emails from your inbox to a folder, or from a folder to another folder, simply drag it from the current location to the destination folder.

Alternatively, you can use the Message menu, choose Move, and pick the destination folder from the unfolding menus and submenus representing folder locations.

To copy an email to a folder, rather than move it, drag it and drop it to the destination folder while holding down the Control key ("Ctrl").

Customizing a Folder's Character Encoding

Mozilla Mail lets you define custom character encoding settings for any given folder. To view or change these settings, right-click on the folder, and choose Properties.

Character Encoding is the way Windows (and other operating systems) treat text content. The default for Latin alphabet languages (like English, French, Romanian…) is Western ISO-8859.

The International Organization for Standardization is an organization that standardizes technologies to ensure that vendors' products (even competing ones) can communicate with each other.

Using Labels in Mozilla Mail

Labels are a nice way to visually create relationships between email, and allowing you to isolate certain emails from the rest, (as we'll discover in the Mozilla Mail Search Bar tutorial.)

Conveniently, labels are color-coded. Fortunately, label names and colors can be customized, see tip below. Labels are "categories" to classify your emails. But there are currently only five labels available. Just enough to get you hooked.

Labels are color-coded, and can be customized. To customize your labels and label-colors: choose Edit > Preferences, and select the Labels entry under your email account.

The default labels in Mozilla Mail: Important (Red) Work (Orange) Personal (Green) To Do (Blue) Later (Purple)

1-5 Assign a label to the selected email
0 (zero) Un-label the selected email

• Internet Fax Service
• anonymous email
• Email Hosting
• Email Fax
• email marketing software
• Personal Email Address