Track unanswered mails in Thunderbird

Solution 1:

If you send an important email, then go to the Sent folder and hit the 1 key with the email highlighted. This will tag it as Important.

1. Create a search folder by right-clicking the Sent folder and choosing Search, then at the bottom choose Save as Search Folder

2. Give the folder a good name "Sent Important", and create as a sub-folder of whatever makes sense to you.

3. Click the Choose.. button and confirm that only the Sent folder is ticked.

4. Change the first drop-down to read Tags, and make sure the condition is "Important".

5. Click Create.

Now you will have a folder containing all your important Sent items. If you want to mark one as dealt with, you just hit 1 on it again, which will remove the important tag.

Solution 2:

I found the Thunderbird remindIt plugin.

From the send button you can open the dropdown and puss "send and remind". It will automatically tag the mail in the sent folder with a RemindIt.Pending tag. When somebody answers the mail, the tag is automatically removed.

So far that is absolutely what I need.

There is a reminder text to be configured, so it looks like it will re-send the mail with a reminder text after an also configurable reminder timespan. In my tests I could not see this function.

But what happens is, that the tag of messages that were not answered changes to RemindIt.Expired so you can make a search folder based on this tag to see which mails need answer.