Setting up an email in Thunderbird

While much of the world is transfixed by the Cloud, life as a desktop based email is still hugely popular with much of the community (myself included). Theres something reassuring about having access to all your emails on your personal computers even without an internet connection.

Thunderbird is an Open-Source email client brought to you by th Mozilla Organization. It has an integrated calendar, works well with Firefox and can be synched amongst all your computers whether MAC or PC.

Here is a short overview of how to install Thunderbird on your computer.

Click here

And it downloads the setup program

Then click on the download box when its complete

You get this window.

Click Run

You get this

Then this

Click Next

Then click Install

And you get this

then this

Click Finish

The setup programme will now run Thunderbird on your computer for the first time, and will offer a few options to begin with:

This window lets you import your contact lists from Outlook. If you want to transfer this into Thunderbird then just click Next,

or click on the dont import anything if you dont want this.

Ive been using Outlook so Ill import the information (ie just click Next).

Then Thunderbird opens:

To access your mail just click Get Mail. If you have a password-protected email then it might ask you for this at this point, or simply download your mail into the Inbox.

If you havent imported addresses from Outlook, then youll need to set up your emails to download from the server. To do this, select Account settings from the Tools menu:

Then select Account Actions -> Add Mail Account

Fill in the relevant details that you will have from your Email host (usually your web host). If youre unsure, call your host for the correct details.

It will automatically try and find your email settings, which is pretty cool. If it cant find yours then click Manual Config and have your web host information ready (or call them).

I like to have the added security of entering my password whenever I check the mail. If you dont care, leave the Remember password box ticked.

If all seems right, then click Create Account.

And (all going well) you can then click Get Mail to download all your emails from the server.

And thats it. You can set up email folders to file your mail in the same way as you would any folder system (ie right-click -> new folder) and you can even set mail to automatically file itself depending on what it contains... But thats a story for another article...

This tutorial was brought to you by the team at Explainafide, a creative web design agency based in Australia. Keep your eyes open for more tuts over the coming weeks.