How to set-up Thunderbird Email Client

What is Mozilla Thunderbird™?

If you have learnt anything from my website you will have noticed that I am a true fan of open source software. Thunderbird is one of my favourite tools, and one that is recommended to my clients and any small business for managing their emails, diaries, appointments and contacts. Once you start using it you won’t know what you did without it.

Thunderbird is like outlook, but in my opinion…..better! Thunderbird is a free, open-source and cross-platform e-mail client for most operating systems including, but not limited to, Windows, Linux and Macintosh. It is a robust and easy to use email client, similar to competing products like Outlook Express, but with some major advantages such as the fact that tons of free addons are developed by a world of developers making managing our email accounts easy.

Why is Thunderbird Useful?

Your probably asking why you would bother with Thunderbird when you can simply open up your email account in a browser? Well, for example, say you have both a hotmail and a gmail accounts and you also have 2 accounts for your website, would you really want to have to open all 4 emails accounts separately, in different browsers, to check your emails every time? Whats more, have to have 4 different browsers open on your computer all the time so you can check your email continuously? Further, does your email account alert you to new mail? Well, Thunderbird shows a little pop up in the bottom corner of your computer every time you get mail.

When you want to open all your email accounts, you simply click the Thunderbird icon on your desktop and when prompted, enter your email passwords, and that’s it. Much more simple eh? All your email accounts accessible in one click and with only one window needing to be open on your desktop.

This tutorial will help you set up the Mozilla Thunderbird™ e-mail client to work with your e-mail account(s). This tutorial is written for setting up Thunderbird on Windows so your set up may vary to these intructions.

Installing Thunderbird Email Client

Ok, so you want to try Thunderbird out, well you can get your copy of Thunderbird email client here. This is for Windows users and is also the English version. If you would like any other operating system or language compatible versions then search the Thunderbird email client list here. Click on the download option as show below:

Depending on the browser you are using you will see a pop up window which prompts you to save the file to your computer. Save the file to somewhere you can remember and access easily such as your desktop.

Open the file and allow Windows to continue installation when the security pop up box opens.

Click next at the welcome prompt.

Accept the terms and conditions.

Do a standard installation, hitting next through the installation wizard. Installation will continue automatically.

Hit the next key and the application will begin to install on your computer. Click finish to launch Thunderbird making sure the “launch thunderbird now” tickbox is ticked.

That’s it, you have successfully installed Thunderbird but in its current state its is just an application on your computer, to get anythingfrom it you need to configure your email accounts. I will talk you through doing this below.

Configuring Email Accounts in Thunderbird

When opened the first time, you will have the option to import contacts and other information from Outlook. Do so if you wish and continue to the program. If you use outlook already I would recomend you say yes to importing, it will save you time in the long run. If you do not use it, then don’t bother.

The wizard will prompt you to configure e-mail, RSS, and newsgroups. At this point we will set up one of your email accounts. I will cover RSS feeds later in this tutorial.

You will need information about your e-mail server now. Mail server settings usually take the format of “mail.yourwebaddress.co.uk”, if you are using FABI Hosting this is the format for you email server. If you are using any other web hosting service you can try the above or you may need to contact your web host to find out what the mailserver address is, it is usually referenced somewhere in your hosting control panel, so check there first.

After Thunderbird installs it should take you to the New Account Setup screen shown below, if for some reason it doesn’t then simply open Thunderbird and go to the File menu, select New, then select Account.

Select the email account option as shown in the image above, to configure your email accounts, one by one. Now this part is written particularly for FABI-Hosting clients, but once you know your own hosting mailserver details just substitute where appropriate.

Enter the name you would like to appear in the from field when you send your emails to others. Then enter the email address you want to set up, then hit the next button. See below:

Now the next screen is a bit tricky. If you are setting up a hosting account, such as an email account supplied by FABI Hosting such as your website email account, then you will select IMAP server on the next screen. If you are setting up a POP email account such as Hotmail or Gmail then select POP and follow the instructions further down this page.

Thunderbird IMAP Settings

Select the IMAP radio button and enter your email server address, usually in the format mail.yourwebaddress.co.uk or .com and hit the next button. See below for example, but make sure you read the instructions through the wizard as it basically tells you how to do this.

The next window asks you for your username, this is usually your email address, see below:

Enter the name of the account, this will show in your account list so pick something that makes it clear which account it is. For example, you could call it the name of your website. Remember, you may set up a number of email accounts to show in this list such as your personal hotmail accounts and gmail accounts. You could even simply call it the actual email address name, then there is no doubting what email account it is for.

Hit next and you will see a summary of the information you have entered, clicking finish will set up your account for you.

Now in the list of accounts on the left hand side of your screen you will see the account you have just set up.

Simply click on the words “inbox” and a password box will appear for you to enter a password to access your emails. You can tick the “remember password” box so you never have to login to this accout manually again

Thunderbird POP Settings for HotMail

Now, if you want to set up Thunderbird for use with Hotmail then you need to follow these instructions which are slighly different to the above.

Warning! This tutorial uses a method called POP3 to check your e-mail. As Thunderbird downloads your e-mail to your computer, the messages will be removed from the Hotmail servers. If you do not want to remove your e-mail from the Hotmail servers, do not follow these directions.

Select the POP radio button and enter the email server address for Hotmail, which is pop3.live.com and hit the next button. See below for example.

IMPORTANT: If you are setting up multiple accounts for use with Thunderbird make sure on this screen you UNTICK the “use global inbox” option as this will just drop all your emails into the local inbox folder and you will probably want to keep all your seperate email account emails seperate.

Enter the username for the account, it defaults to the first portion of your email address which should be fine, but you may want to enter the full email address here for clarity.

Enter the name of the account, this will show in your account list so pick something that makes it clear which account it is. Remember, you may set up a number of email accounts to show in this list such as your personal hotmail accounts and gmail accounts and website accounts. You could even simply call it the actual email address name, then there is no doubting what email account it is for.

Hit next and you will be taken to the final congratulations page where you need to review the information you have entered and check it is all correct. There is a little tick box on this page saying download emails now, if you allow this then all emails in your hotmail inbox will be downloaded to your local computer, and as stated before they will be removed from your hotmail account.

Now this probably will not work at this point and there is a little more confiiguration that need to be done. Right click on the newly created account name which will now be showing in your left hand sidebar, then from the menu select properties as shown below.

In the properties screen you can change loads of settings such as how often emails are downloaded, create your signature and set the path to it, allocate disk space, configure junk mail settings etc, take you time to have a browse around this area.

The option you are interested in at the moment is the Server Settings panel just under the account name and shown below.

Looking at the the image above make sure the Port is 995, by selecting SSL under the Security Settings section. If the port does not change when you select SSL simply type in 995 manually.

Now we need to add the outgoing server for this account.

Right at the bottom of the window you for account settings you have open you will see an option for Outgoing SMTP server. See image below:

Select Add to enter the Hotmail windows Live SMTP server details:

• Port: 587
• Server: Name smtp.live.com
• Check TLS
• User Name: youremail@live.com

as shown below:

Now the final step is to go back to the hotmail account settings page by selecting the account name. See the image below. On this screen you can select the outgoing SMTP server as shown.

That’s it, it should all be done, test your settings by simply sending yourself an email.

We hope you found this article useful. If you have any comments, or questions or spot any errors please leave a comments below.

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