I am looking at my Thunderbird inbox right now and I thought I would share my opinion on using this FREE software. So here is my opinion: if you are not using it you are creating a hassle for yourself and you are not as organized as you could be. Now maybe you don’t have over 10 inbox’s that you manage like me, but even if you have 2 it will be a great time saver to be able to view and send emails from one location on your desktop. That’s right, Mozilla Thunderbird will automatically import your mail for you, making it possible to view all of your inbox’s from one organized area. You can also choose which email inbox you would like to send an email from. This means you can easily separate your eBay email from your personal email from your work email, and check them all from one location.
Here are the steps to getting started with Mozilla Thunderbird:
- Download the software
- Install the software
- Create a new account
That is really how easy it is. Creating an account can be a bit of a task so I will explain that in a bit more detail. You will want to select File->New->Account from the menu. You will then be asked what kind of account you want to setup. For email you are either going to select “Email Account” or “Gmail”. The easiest of these two is to setup a Gmail account. This only requires that you fill in your Gmail email address and the name for the account. If you choose Email account you will be prompted to fill out they type of incoming server and the incoming server name along with options such as the account name. This can be a bit more of a task so I will provide links to pages that describe this process in more detail for some of the more popular email providers. I have also added two images for your reference below.
Links to tutorials on setting up Yahoo and Hotmail in Thunderbird:
Yahoo-Setting up a Yahoo account in Thunderbird is a bit of a hassle it requires that you configure a separate piece of software called yPops
Hotmail- Hotmail does not require sperate software, you just have to follow a heck of a lot of steps
If you have either of these services and can’t get things setup I recommend that you switch to a Gmail account. Gmail and Mozilla have teamed up to make the process of adding a Gmail account to your Thunderbird software a breeze.
