On 2017-02-06 17:41, William W. Austin wrote:

Over the years I have used a variety of mailer GUI's (not to mention tty-based interfaces) and I am trying to "modernize" a bit and move to thunderbird.

....
[SNIP]

Apologies - somehow my original email was severely truncated in transit.  But that's irrelevant and I have found a way to solve the problem.

It isn't obvious, but it is possible to do it and if there is any interest I can send the procedure.  (Basically it's a mixture of shell scripts* and GUI actions.)

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* if you don't like shell scripts the commands aren't that difficult to cut and paste - I just did it that way so that I wouldn't have to type it twice...

Thanks to anyone who sent a response off-list whom I haven't already thanked.

 -- William Austin
-- 
william w. austin                                     airedad@att.net
"life is just another phase i'm going through. this time, anyway ..."