How to Configure an Email Account in Thunderbird

This is a tutorial to assist you in configuring an email account in the program Thunderbird. The first thing that has to be done is an email account has to be created in your hosting cPanel. If you need assistance in doing this, please watch the tutorial "How To Create a POP Email Account". Once you have your email account created, you are ready to set up Thunderbird to allow you to read and send email right from your desktop, without having to go to webmail.

Start by opening Mozilla Thunderbird, and finding the menu at the top of the window. Find Tools, and click on the link. In the drop down menu, at the bottom you will find the listing for Account Settings.. click on that. The Account Settings window will open. Scroll down, and on the left hand side click on the Add Account button.

This will open the Account Wizard window. Make sure the Email Account option is selected, and click on Next. This opens the Identity window. In the first box, enter your name as you would like it to appear in the From field of outgoing emails. The second box is for your complete email address, the one others use to send email to you. When you are done, click on the Next button.

The next window is Server Information. Now you need to enter your incoming server information, which was provided to you in your welcome email. Select POP for your server, and your server name will be "mail.yourdomain.com" with the yourdomain.com being the actual name of your domain. Then click Next.

This takes us to a User Name screen. You need to enter the email username this will be your entire email address. The second box is for your outgoing username, which is typically the same as your incoming username, unless you're using a different SMTP server. When you are done, click Next.

Now you need to enter a name for this new account, so that you can identify it in the mail list. For example, "Work Account" "Home Account". etc. Click Next.

The last screen is a Congratulations. Verify that the information is correct and if everything looks right, click on Finish to complete the Wizard. This will take you back to the Account Settings screen. We now need to finish configuring the SMTP outgoing mail server. Scroll up, and under the account, in the list on the left hand side, you will see the Outgoing Server (SMTP) link. Click the link. It will open a box in the right-hand column called Outgoing Server Settings. In the box, click on the Default SMTP server that is listed. Then click Edit. This opens another small box. Where it says Server Name, in that box you are to enter the Outgoing server setting. It was given to you in your welcome email. Under Security and Authentication, make sure that the box is checked that says Use name and Password. This means that Thunderbird will login to your mail server even when sending an email and not just when receiving. This ensures that you are the only one that can send emails from your account. Most SMTP servers use the same username and password as the incoming POP servers. Enter your username in the box. Click OK when finished.

This will take you back to the account settings page, where you can see your account is listed. Scroll down the page, and click OK, to return to the main Thunderbird page.

We have now successfully set up Thunderbird to send and receive emails for this email account. You can do this for as many accounts as you wish, but remember, you have to create the account in your hosting cPanel before it will work! This ends this tutorial.

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