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Subscribing to Email Folders

Most graphical email clients do not show folders to the user unless they have been subscribed to. This document shows how to subscribe to folders in Thunderbird.

Introduction

Email messages are conventionally collected together into folders. Although older command-line email clients tend to show all of the available folders when folders are being viewed, most graphical clients show only a subset of folders to which the user has subscribed. This, one presumes, is to help handle the problem of too many folders obscuring the important ones, but it also raises a major problem in complex email environments where folders can be created automatically behind the scenes. If a new folder is created, the user has no way of being automatically informed of its presence and it will not be visible until the user subscribes to it.

This document is intended to provide instructions on how to subscribe to folders in a number of common email clients. Since the most prevalent email user agent in this department is Mozilla Thunderbird, we will start with it.


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