Thunderbird is an extremely configurable email client. There are also different levels of configurability: some settings are global to the entire application, some are per account, some are per mail folder, etc. These distinctions are usually obvious and common-sensical, but in my experience, there are some configuration settings which the application only allows to be set globally, but which I personally want to behave differently based on which mail folder I’m currently working in.
One solution to this is to ask the Thunderbird development team to make those settings configurable per-folder, or if you’re a developer with some time on your hands, submit a pull request to the team containing the desired change. However, the “ask the team” approach takes a long time and there’s no guarantee that anyone on the team will ever get around to implementing your request (realistically, they probably won’t), submitting PRs to Thunderbird is time-consuming, and even if you submit a PR there’s no guarantee that the TB dev team will accept it.
Given these constraints, I decided on a different approach for solving this problem: I wrote a Thunderbird extension which pays attention to which folder you’re currently working in and automatically adjust global preferences accordingly.
More details about the extension and installation instructions can be found on GitHub. Unfortunately, this extension is not available for download on addons.thunderbird.net, because the moderators of the site are not currently accepting submissions of new extensions which use experimental APIs, and it’s impossible to implement the functionality in this extension without experimental APIs.
