155. Find a Message  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 154 Get Your Email
It won't take too long before you receive so many email messages that you'll find it difficult to just scroll through and locate the one message you want to read right now. Luckily, Thunderbird makes it easy for you to locate a specific message by searching through the message headers, the sender information, the subject line, and even the message text itself. 155. Find a Message 
Another method you can use to locate a message is to sort the message headers. You can sort them alphabetically by subject or sender, of course, as well as in a variety of other ways as you'll learn in this task. | 1. | Choose Area to Search
The portion of each message that will be searched appears in faint text within the Search box on the Search bar. For example, it might be set to Subject or Sender , which searches the subject line and the sender field of each message in the current folder. You can search a different message area instead by clicking the Magnifying Glass button in front of the Search box and selecting the area to search.
After you select an area to search such as Entire Message , that area will be used for subsequent searches until you change the selection again.
| | 2. | Type Search Text Click in the Search box and type the text or phrase you want to search for. Messages matching your search criteria appear in the listing.  TIPS To redisplay all message headers after performing a search, click the X that appears at the right end of the Search box. To place the headers that match your search in an email folder of their own, click the Magnifying Glass button while the results of your search are still displayed, and choose Save Search as a Folder . | | 3. | Click Column to Sort To sort your messages so that you can find a particular one, click the column heading by which you want to sort. For example, to sort the messages by Sender , click that column. If you click the column again, messages are sorted in reverse alphabetical order. Here, I'm sorting by Subject line. TIP To sort messages by a field that's not displayed, choose View, Sort by from the menu and then select a sort option from the submenu that appears. | | 4. | Change the View
Another way to quickly locate an email image is to change the view. For example, you learned in 154 Get Your Email , how to label messages and then display only messages with a particular label. Open the View list on the Search bar and select the view you want.
In addition to displaying only messages with a particular label such as Important , you can use the View list to display only mail you haven't read yet, recent mail (from the last two days), mail from the last five days, mail from people in your Contacts list, email with attached files, and email that's not identified as junk. If you choose Customize from the View list, you can set up your own criteria and create a custom viewfor example, a view that shows only messages from your family or messages that are replies to messages you've sent.
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