Windows Live Mail: any way to collapse all the email account folders?

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Does anyone know of a way, an app, a program, a registry tweak that will let me collapse my 10 email accounts and hide their names in the left pane in Windows Live Mail? All I need to see in the left pane is: 1 inbox. 1 outbox. 1 sent folder. 1 drafts folder. 1 “deleted items” folder. And all of my 75+ folders and subfolders I have created beneath them.

I can use Message Rules to send some of the incoming mail to my own folders and subfolders. I can even create a single inbox and use Rules to redirect all mail from all the many inboxes in my 10 accounts to the inbox I created.

I can scroll the left pane so that all I see are the inbox, outbox, sent folder, drafts folder and deleted items folder along with my own folders and then work with everything important to me being close together in the left pane.

Has anyone figured out a way to accomplish this??

Thank you!!!

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Try our programming forum!!

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Jason – programming forum on this site? I’ll look for it.

Kelliann

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I could not find anything in the programming forum regarding tweaks to Windows Live Mail that would let you collapse all the mailboxes and show only a single mailbox. Compact Views doesn’t do the job at all. No matter what tricks I tried, I still have visible list of all my inboxes, one for each email account. I don’t want to look in 10 inboxes, and don’t want a gigantic 250,000-message library style “all inbox at the top” either. I want to be able to have mail come into a single box and then be able to manually delete what I don’t want and move some out of that inbox to other folders. I also want to use Message Rules to move certain things that I get from a single source repeatedly from that one inbox to their own folders.

I believe that if I use that library-style inbox at the top, if I delete something out of there because I want to pare that size down so I can find things in the inbox faster, it will also delete it out of any storage folder that I put it in. That would not work for me.

On the computer I am talking about now, which I just got, I have Windows 7 Home and WLMail 2011.

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I want to be able to have mail come into a single box and then be able to manually delete what I don’t want and move some out of that inbox to other folders. I also want to use Message Rules to move certain things that I get from a single source repeatedly from that one inbox to their own folders.

Quick view, All inbox would allow you to either move or delete messages from a single inbox; and rules could still move them to other folders too.

I believe that if I use that library-style inbox at the top, if I delete something out of there because I want to pare that size down so I can find things in the inbox faster, it will also delete it out of any storage folder that I put it in. That would not work for me.

If a message has already been moved from that All inbox to a folder by you or by a rule then it wouldn’t still be in that single inbox. But if you have copied a message to a storage folder, then deleting it from the single All inbox will not delete it from that storage folder.

I think you can get exactly what you asked for (with the exception of a single Deleted items folder). But it seems you can’t get rid of a separate Unread summary folder at the top.

Bruce

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Bruce –
I tried what you suggested and I think it would work. It is enormously confusing and complicated to me to have to keep track of separate inboxes. I find that if I move a message out of the All Inboxes to something like drafts, for instance, it does go out of All Inboxes. And I can delete it from the drafts folder without anything weird happening.

My next problem is that I have several email addresses and this is something I asked about in another thread so won’t repeat it all here, but, what I also need is to not see all those separate accounts. I will be importing mail and folders from Outlook Express and that will set up a folder tree under storage folders. After that, I very much want the Quick View “Library” folders to be immediately above the storage folder tree so that when I drag a message out of All Inboxes I can make the column scroll til it reaches where I want to drop the message. I have found this far faster than to right click and “move message.” If I wanted to copy it to more than one folder, I just held control down while dragging to the next folder. Collapsing each account so it only shows account name helps but it isn’t good enough. I want them to be invisible. Too much chance of something ending up in the wrong folder and lost.

Any thoughts on how to make those many accounts invisible? It should be an option in the program but if it is, I haven’t found it yet. I find these many separate “exploded” toolbars really confusing and time consuming to use. I am building a Quick Access toolbar – discovered if I right click on a button in one of those many toolbars that come with the tabs, it often offers to let me put it on the Quick Access bar. I was very happy with most of that stuff being in dropdown menu form, not hanging out there confusing me when I go looking for one thing.

Speed and efficiency is what I need from my email program. So far, I am finding WLM is not giving me that.

Quick view, All inbox would allow you to either move or delete messages from a single inbox; and rules could still move them to other folders too.

If a message has already been moved from that All inbox to a folder by you or by a rule then it wouldn’t still be in that single inbox. But if you have copied a message to a storage folder, then deleting it from the single All inbox will not delete it from that storage folder.

I think you can get exactly what you asked for (with the exception of a single Deleted items folder). But it seems you can’t get rid of a separate Unread summary folder at the top.

Bruce

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Bruce
LOL! I got my threads mixed up. THIS is the thread where I was asking about dealing with the multiple accounts showing up. . Spent too many hours trying to make sense of WLM I guess. I am about to go start another thread about photos and wlm – having big trouble with that.

Kelliann

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In Windows Live Mail 2011 you can use View, Quick Views to select All Inbox, All drafts, All Sent items and All junk email which will display messages from all email accounts.

It appears to me that you only get one Outbox for all accounts anyway, but that Deleted items have to be under each account.

You can also add or remove any folders to/from “Compact View”.

Bruce

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I don’t think you’ll be able to make the collapsed account names invisible. But if you right click on them you can move them down, below displayed storage folders and outbox.

Bruce

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I fiddled with moving mailboxes down below storage folders, and it worked. Only thing is, they won’t stay there!! If I close the main mail window, and reopen it, they are *back where they originally were!* Is this frustrating, or what! To be just on the edge of what you want, then not be able to make it stay. I have not yet found a setting to fix this.

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Bruce, that is perfect! Thank you so much! I tried doing that with WLM 2009 over and over again and it didn’t work, so I never even tried it with 2011. Well, then that solves one problem. Now I need to work on the photo problem I am asking about in another thread. That too is an essential part of what I need in an email program (to be able to both attach and send small file size photos in one simple operation inside the mail program by selecting photos in My Pictures, then having them open in an email as both attachments and visible photos with space between them for typing (this is for my work).

Thanks again, and I will work on learning how to handle the “all inbox” etc. It is really just a “shadow” or “mirror” or “library” without any real messages in its file someplace on the disk, right? The “real” messages are in the individual inboxes? I tried dragging a message out of it and then back into it. It would go out but not back in. If I put the msg back into the original inbox, it will show up in All Inboxes again.

Every so often I like to pull messages out of each folder when the number gets over say, 4000 or so, and put them into a separate folder labeled with the original folder’s name plus a from-to date. This keeps each individual folder small enough to keep the mail program from crashing. So the idea of having a couple hundred thousand messages or more in one location doesn’t sound good to me. OTOH if they aren’t “really” actually stored in that all inbox folder, maybe it would be safe.

I guess I really need to know the inner workings of what WLM does with its files.

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Drat. Same here, now you’ve pointed it out. I never imagined that stickiness would need to be tested.

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Any ideas on how to make them stick? This is so nuts, isn’t it?

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Just an update saying I am still looking for a way to make those moved mailbox folders stay where you put them. I still can’t find anything about it out on the web. It is a difficult query to make, though. Phrasing it the right way to get some hits is very difficult.

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