How To Bulk Delete Thunderbird Group Email FAST!

Everyone has to clean up their email Inbox eventually, and some of us have groups where every member hits “Reply To All” every time they respond. Are you tired of having to sort your email and delete all those responses by sender?

Thunderbird has an easy way to fix the problem. After a quick setup, the process is fast and easy.

Here are the steps to set up a system for handling all the emails related to a particular group of addresses:

First let’s collect the email names and addresses for the group.

1. Open a fresh text file.
2. In Thunderbird, open one of the group emails, right-click the sender, copy the name and email address, and paste to the text file. Append a comma followed by a space to this information.
3. Press CTRL+U to open the email source.
4. Look for the remaining email names and addresses.
5. Highlight and copy these names and addresses, then append them to the line you started in the text file.

Now let’s set up a new Address Book.

1. In Thunderbird, select Tools > Address Book to open the Address Book window.
2. In the Address Book window, select File > New > Address Book.
3. Name the New Address Book and click OK.
4. Right-click on the new Address Book, select “New List,” and name the new list.
5. Highlight and copy all the names and addresses from the text file you created.
6. Paste the entire list of names and addresses into the first line of the block that begins “Type email addresses…” The entire list should automatically be separated so that each address now appears as a separate line in the window.
7. Click OK and close the Address Book window.

Time to add a new Tag.

1. Select Message > Tag > New Tag.
2. Name the new tag (this can be the same as the name of the Address Book List if you choose).
3. Click OK.

Now let’s add a Message Filter to assign the new tag to emails related to the new Address Book.

1. Select Tools > Message Filters and select New in the Message Filters window.
2. Enter a filter name (this can be the same as your Tag name if you choose).
3. Choose when to apply the filter. Make sure you select “Manually Run” and “Getting New Mail.”
4. In the Match box choose “From, To, Cc or Bcc” in the first list box; choose “is in my address book” in the second list box; and choose the name of your new Address Book from the third list box.
5. In the “Perform these actions” box, select “Tag Message” from the first list box; and select your new tag from the second list box. Click OK.

The set up process is done and we’re ready to use the filter.

From now on, all incoming email containing any email address from the new list you just set up will be assigned the new tag you created.

To use this filter to manually assign the new tag to existing email in your Inbox, go to the Message Filters window, select your new filter, make sure the Inbox is selected for the correct email address (if you have more than one email address), and click “Run Now.”

To bulk delete emails assigned the new tag, make sure View > Toolbars > Mail Toolbar is enabled. Then:

1. Make sure the “Quick Filter” button is clicked to display a list of icons.
2. Click the Tag icon to display the list of available tags.
3. Select the tag you created for the group.
4. From the filtered email list, you can review and delete selected emails, or bulk delete the entire list.
5. When you are done, click the Tag icon to turn off the filter, or click the Quick Filter to turn filtering off entirely.

That’s all there is to it!