A new install of Thunderbird has the default folder view set to “Threaded” view and the sort order set to “Ascending”. Each folder can be setup to change the view to something different but what about changing all folders at once in Thunderbird?

Here is how to quickly change the view for all folders to “Unthreaded” and sort-by-date (descending) via the config editor.

I want to be able to browse to a folder in Thunderbird, and, when I open it, view the email in that folder filtered by date order (newest at the top), by thread (oldest at the end of the chain), with threads expanded.

Using Thunderbird's View menu, I can do this per folder, but I could not find a way to set it by default.

Here is an approach which works, but it is a bit convoluted.