Email Clients Tutorials
Mozilla Mail Tutorial
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
Receiving Emails with Mozilla Mail
If you are lucky enough to be in front of your computer when new emails arrive, you will see a small ticker appear for a few seconds on the bottom right of your screen. You can click the blue "has X new messages" text to show Mozilla Mail.
By default, when you receive a new email, Mozilla Mail displays an envelope icon in the tray area of the Windows Taskbar, (next to the clock.) This one, unlike the popup New Email popup indicator, will remain visible in the system tray area until at least one of your new emails is marked as read.
New emails in Mozilla Mail are shown in bold-face to distinguish themselves from read mail. You can toggle an email's "Read" status by clicking the dot (read) or green star (unread) icon.
MToggles the selected email's "Read" status
Customizing Email Column Headers
By default, incoming mail is sorted by date. Email order can be customized on the fly by clicking on the appropriate columns:
Clicking on a header button will sort the email folder in ascending or descending order; clicking the same header button will invert the sort order.
Column headers can be added or removed by clicking the right-most button header, and checking or un-checking the column names.
To change the left-to-right order in which your email columns appear in Mozilla Mail, hold down a column with your mouse, and drag it to the desired destination. (A visual feedback will appear in the form of a vertical bar.)
Reading Your Emails In Conversation Threads
Usually, simply sorting your emails by received date is enough. But Mozilla Mail lets you optionally group together related emails in an email thread (or "conversation"). This makes both filing emails and reading emails in context a lot easier.
A thread of emails can be expanded or collapsed using the triangular arrow. A collapsed email thread looks like a normal email, with a triangular arrow pointing to the right. An expanded email thread has a triangular arrow pointing downwards from its first email.
To view your emails as conversation threads, go to View > Sort By > Threaded, (or Unthreaded to stop showing emails as threads.)
Mozilla Mail automatically reverts to unthreaded mode when you change your emails' sort order.
Flagging Emails
Mozilla Mail lets you "Flag" emails to make them stand out from the rest. Flagging emails is an easy "to do" reminder. You should see an orange flag icon appear and disappear by clicking the dot in the Flag column. (Make sure that the Flag column is visible: see above, Cutomizing Email Column Headers.)
Email Headers
By default, Mozilla Mail shows you five pieces of information about every email. Often, this information is redundant with the email column headers. To save space or limit information to the minimum, you can collapse the email headers pane by clicking the downward triangular arrow:
