[Tip] Use Minimize to System Tray Feature in Mozilla Thunderbird

Minimize to System Tray is an essential feature which should be present in all desktop email client software. Many people prefer to use desktop apps to check and send/receive emails using their email accounts rather than using their email service provider’s website. Email client programs can be used offline without any need of Internet connection so it helps users in reading existing emails whenever they need.

Email client apps need to be running all the time in background so that we can immediately get a notification whenever a new email arrives in our Inbox. That’s where “Minimize to System Tray” feature comes handy.

If an email client software comes with minimize to system tray option, we can move the app to system tray (Taskbar notification area) where other icons such as clock, volume, network, etc are shown in Taskbar. It helps in reducing occupied space on Taskbar and we can get enough free space to open and use other programs.

To use minimize to system tray feature, we just need to minimize our email client app and it automatically hides the main window and moves to system tray as an icon and doesn’t show in Taskbar programs list. Now whenever we need to use the app again, we can click on its icon in system tray and it’ll open on our computer screen.

In this tutorial, we’ll talk about the popular desktop email client software “Mozilla Thunderbird“. In past it didn’t provide “Minimize to System Tray” functionality and users had to use 3rd party extensions to bring this functionality to Thunderbird as mentioned in following tutorial:

[Tip] How to Minimize Mozilla Thunderbird to System Tray on Close

Now the good news is that finally the newer versions of Mozilla Thunderbird (version 78 and later) come with “Minimize to System Tray” functionality built-in. If you are using a new version of Thunderbird, you don’t need to use any extra extension to add this feature. You can activate and enable “Minimize to System Tray” feature using Thunderbird settings.

If you also want to enable minimize to system tray functionality in Mozilla Thunderbird, following steps will help you:

1. Open Mozilla Thunderbird and press ALT key on your keyboard to temporarily show Menu bar. Now select Tools -> Options.

Alternatively, you can click on 3-lines Hamburger menu present at the end of the toolbar and select Options.

It’ll open Thunderbird Options page.

2. In General tab, look for following option in right-side pane:

Enable the option and it’ll activate minimize to system tray functionality in Thunderbird.

Now you can try to minimize Thunderbird and it’ll hide the main window and will move the icon to Taskbar system tray.

PS: Remember this option only works when you minimize Thunderbird. It’ll not work when you close the app.

Also Check:

4t Tray Minimizer: Free Utility to Minimize Applications to System Tray in Windows