This is a follow-up to Matt Singley’s great article at his site- mattsingley.com That talks about 4 ways you can manage Twitter. I would just like to add some additional steps to make it the same thing happen with GMAIL and Mozilla Thunderbird. Matt mentions Outlook in his article.
So you have jumped into Twitter and you are starting to get people following you. This is great and hopefully exactly what you want. Most people do use Outlook, but the rules that Matt talks about can be setup in Mozilla Thunderbird and GMAIL. First I’ll talk Thunderbird and then GMAIL.
Thunderbird uses what is called “Message Filters”. Open Thunderbird, menu item “Tools” and choose “Message Filters”. The following Dialog shows up, choose “New”:
Dialog box to create message filters in Thunderbird
Next you get to enter the fields you want to use to filter your messages.
Dialog box showing fields used to filter message
You will notice I use two fields. By default you will only have one field- just click the ‘plus’ symbol to get additional. The first, is using the a keyword “following” in the subject line and then using the phrase “twitter-follower” in the “From” field. The message must match both for the filter to run- make sure the radio button nest to “Match all the following” is selected. There are numerous ways to do this, Matt suggests using a different EMAIL address which would allow you to only use a “To” field. Either way works-completely up to you. The bottom portion shows what I want done with the filtered message. In my case, I move the message to a separate folder and away from my other EMAILs. Keeps my Inbox cleaner. Then I click “OK” and now the new Filter is active and ready to go.
Final filter dialog box with New filter highlighted.
Thunderbird allows you to choose the new filter and run it immediately if you want. Or you just click the “X” to close the dialog. Now all your Twitter Follower messages will move to another folder.
Hope you enjoyed and let me know what you think. Share other ways you have found to manage your Twitter follower emails or any of your emails for that matter.
And speaking of Twitter- follow me @smartalyx and
a shout out to @mattsingley as well.
