When you install a fresh new version of Thunderbird and you have an IMAP server like GMail with thousands (yes!) of folders it can be very frustrating going inside of each folder and manually change the default view settings of Thunderbird; that are:
- sort by date
- ascending order
- unthreaded view
If you want to change the default settings used by Thunderbird to display each folder in order to make them look more in a GMail way:
- set descending order by date
- enable threaded view
you can accomplish this by opening the advanced config editor of Thunderbird and change the following parameters.
Sort by Date
Check for mailnews.default_sort_type and make sure the value is 18
Change from Ascending to Descending
Change mailnews.default_sort_order from 1 (ascending) to 2 (descending).
Enable Threaded View
Change mailnews.default_view_flags from 0 (unthreaded) to 1 (threaded). If you want to expand all messages by default then add the decimal value 32 to the previous value.
You can find the documentation of all this internal flags and value at the Mozilla Knowledge Base website.
Finally save the settings and restart Thunderbird.
All your folders will now respect your new default settings.