You may create multiple profiles in Thunderbird and open only the one you want selecting it in about:profiles
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Privacy
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I'm having a hard time finding how to access about:profiles, but in looking for this I found you can disable the "download messages on startup" option. Maybe Thunderbird is the solution. It will require some more investigation, but this is giving me hope.
Can consider using more than 1 email application. Or using Firefox's containers and access your email service via web (opening the tabs to your email service only when needed).
If you want to prevent IP triangulation stuff, can consider stuff like Port Master or network namespace (if Linux). Idea is that you will run different email applications for different email accounts, and each application will pass through a different VPN tunnel.
Honestly like what others said, I would look towards email aliasing. I usually recommend email aliasing for any activity which you know it would be for a read-only email (ingress/incoming).
Egress/Outgoing is harder to recommend unless its extremely informal or its used to reply to bots.
This way its harder to triangulate your activities through email, as each account uses a unique email alias.
This sounds like a job for email aliasing.
I should clarify that I already have multiple email accounts, so extra aliasing is not necessary. I'm looking for an email client application I can run on my desktop which separates the accounts well enough from the email provider.
How many is "multiple"? You asked for "anonymity focus". Having 3 different accounts doesn't solve that.
Right now I have 663 aliases. Everyone who asks me for an email address gets an alias.
Not trying to argue with you, and I'm sorry I don't have an answer for you, I just think this will better fit your needs.
The difference is that the alias provider or destination email provider can associate all your accounts with your identity. I do not want to give this ability to either the alias provider or the email provider. It is a different threat model. (Please correct if I am wrong)
I did not say how many different accounts I have, but you can assume my separation of accounts is sufficient for my needs.
User data in SimpleLogin is encrypted and deleted after 7 days. It's also self-hostable. Just saying.