Thunderbird Account Setup

The Mozilla Thunderbird eMail client is a free Open Source project that is available for Windows, Mac & Linux operating systems.

The Mozilla Thunderbird eMail client can be downloaded directly from the Mozilla website at http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ and a link to the Wikipedia page is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

This guide assumes the following:
You already have your domain name and eMail account setup, in this guide we are using the domain name of domainname.co.uk and the eMail account of email@domainname.co.uk
Your DNS records are setup and our Mail Services are set to mail.domainname.co.uk 
You have downloaded and installed Mozilla Thunderbird on your computer

We are going to be using Mozilla Thunderbird 31.4.0 on a CentOS 7 Desktop for this guide but all of the steps should be the same for each Operating System

Step 1:
If you have installed a fresh copy of Mozilla Thunderbird once you start the program you will be asked ‘Would you like a new email address?’
You should just click on ‘Skip this and use my existing email‘

If you do not see this screen you can do one of two things.
1> Left click on ‘Local Folders’ in the left hand panel and then click on ‘Email’ under the ‘Create a new account:’ section.
2> Right click on the ‘Local Folders’ option in the left hand panel and then left click on the ‘Settings’ menu option. Then at the bottom of this screen left click on ‘Account Actions’ and then left click on ‘Add mail account’

Step 2:
In the ‘Mail Account Setup’ screen that should now be displayed enter the details as required taking the following into consideration:

• The ‘Your name’ should be as you want other people to see you when they receive an eMail from you.
• The ‘Email address’ should be your full valid eMail address. So for this guide it will be ’email@domainname.co.uk’
• The ‘Password’ is the password that you set when creating your eMail account in the redIT Customer Portal
• We recommend that the ‘Remember password’ option is ticked so that you don’t have to enter your password each time you want to collect or send eMails

After you have entered these details click on the ‘Continue’ button. 

Step 3:
After a short period of time the ‘Mail Account Setup’ screen should change and ask you to confirm your details as shown below.
Using the redIT eMail Service you can use either IMAP or POP3 the difference between the two is:

• POP3 downloads and keeps each eMail that you have received in your eMail client on the computer that you read it on. This means that you can only read the eMail on one computer.
• IMAP uses server side storage. This means that you can download and read a copy of the same eMail on multiple computers, like wise if you create a folder to keep family eMails in this same folder can be seen in your webmail account and on the other computers.

Next click on the ‘Manual Configuration’ button.

Step 4:
If you have selected to use IMAP as your Incoming eMail protocol the ‘Incoming:’ section drop down list should show ‘IMAP’ otherwise it will show ‘POP3’ the ‘Server hostname’ should say the DNS Mail Service record for your domain name which in our example is ‘mail.domainname.co.uk’.
The port information should say either ‘143’ for IMAP or ‘110’ for POP3. The ‘Outgoing:’ SMTP port can be either ‘587’ or ’25’ and we would recomment using port ’25’.
We currently do not offer and ‘SSL’ encryption on our eMail servers so both values should say ‘None’ and your ‘Authenticaion’ should say ‘Normal password’.
Finally ensure that the ‘Username’ section for both ‘Incoming’ and ‘Outgoing’ are your full eMail address.
Now click on the ‘Re-test’ button and then the ‘Done’ button.

Step 5:
You will now be shown a warning informing you that your eMail account does not have any encryption. Click on the ‘I understand the risks’ tick box and click on the ‘Done’ button to continue.

Step 6:
Congratulations, your redIT eMail account is now ready to use and should be shown in the left hand section of the Thunderbird eMail client window.