Add email account in Thunderbird, it is simple and can be done by a total beginner. Here’s how to do that. The guide below is for the beginners and will quickly get you the job done!
Thunderbird is an email client for Windows, Mac, and even Linux users. It’s a free and open source client that has tremendous features and a very intuitive interface. Its interface is also slightly different than Mac Mail and Outlook. Thunderbird is based on the Firefox browser and therefore, you also get UI elements like tabs. When you open a new email in Thunderbird, it opens up in a new tab. In fact, windows like settings, address book, and such also open in a new tab.
How to Add Email Account in Thunderbird
- Step 1: Launch your Thunderbird client.
- Step 2: On the top right side, click on the Settings icon. It looks like three horizontal lines
- Step 3: Enter your name, email address, and password for the account you want to add.
- A) Check “Remember Password” so that you don’t have to enter the password every time the client tries to sync the emails
- Step 4: Click “Continue.” The client will try to connect to the email servers and when it is finished, it will show you the details of your account, like outgoing and ingoing SMTP/IMAP servers name.
- Step 5: Click ‘Done’
Thunderbird will continue downloading emails in the background. If you don’t want to get all the emails from your email servers from current till the very first email, you can change the time period in ‘Settings.’ You can change it to, for instance, “download emails only for the last 30 days.” Note that this applies only to the old emails. After you have added the account, the client will continue downloading/syncing the new incoming and outgoing emails.
When these details (server hostnames, ports, or authentication types) are not found in Thunderbird’s database, you need to manually enter it.
For users who are looking to manually enter the configuration settings of their email account, they can click on “Manual config” in a dialog box at step 3 above. They will have to enter incoming and outgoing server hostnames, port numbers, SSL type, and authentication type, as shown in the image below.
Note that manual configuration is not needed for most modern and IMAP based email accounts, like Gmail, Outlook.com, and so on.
Conclusion
These settings/config can be changed later on as well, such as in cases the email providers have changed them after you were done adding it on Thunderbird. To do so, click on ‘Settings’ icon on the right, go to ‘Account Settings,’ and then to ‘Server Settings.’ Here you can also change other default settings that are automatically set when you add an email account. If those are not according to your preferences, you can change them here. Such as: archiving options, synchronize all messages or only for a specific time period, setting return recipients, specifying folders for ‘Drafts’, and so on.
Hopefully, you now have a clear idea of how to add email account in Thunderbird and how to change some of their essential settings of the account as per your needs.