How to Set Up POP Email Access in Thunderbird

Posted in Tutorials

After following our previous tutorial to create an domain name email, in this tutorial we will show you how to setup Thunderbird to access that email using POP access. If you want to IMAP access, view this tutorial instead. See here for difference between POP and IMAP. IMAP is usually preferred.

Configuring Email Client using POP Access

In this tutorial, let’s configure our free email client Thunderbird to access our email. For other email clients, the concept will be similar. There are two ways for an email client to access the mail server: POP or IMAP. In this tutorial, we will use POP.

First will have to obtain the email settings from our webhost by following these steps.

1. On the same “Email Accounts” page in cPanel, click the “Configure Email Client” menu for your newly created email…

2. And you will see some technical configuration settings that you should input into your email client.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will use POP mail access.

For POP access, there are two settings shown for incoming mail server. And two settings shown for outgoing mail server. One setting is without SSL and one setting is with SSL. You want the setting shown for the one with SSL. This means that email transmission are transmitted via a “secured sockets layer” (in other words, encrypted).

So the setting that we want to jot down are the ones highlighted in red above.

Configuring the Email Settings in Thunderbird

Here the steps may get a bit more technical. And it is different for different email clients. An email client can be Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or another other software that can access emails on the server. Your webhost usually can help you with this. For example, Hostmonster.com has 24×7 phone support that will gladly talk you through over the phone.

In this tutorial, we will use the free email client Thunderbird 3.1.7 as example.

3. In Thunderbird, go to “Tools -> Account Settings” and select “Add Mail Account” from the “Account Actions” …

Thunderbird is able to support access to multiple email accounts.

4. Next it will ask for the name, email address, and password for that email address…

The name is the display name that is shown to the recipients of the email you send out from Thunderbird.

5. Click the “Continue” button and Thunderbird will try to guess the incoming and outgoing mail server settings. Usually, these are not the exact settings that we had wrote down eariler, because Thunderbird usually guess the non-ssl settings. We want the SSL settings that we had wrote down. So we click “Edit” to set the incoming server settings to be the one we had noted.

6. We may not be able to set the outgoing mail settings at this time. But we will edit them in a later step. For now, click “Create Account” after making sure the incoming mail settings are correct. If the “Create Account” button is disabled, click the “Manual Setup” button instead.

7. You will see that your newly create email account is shown in the Account Settings now ..

8. We now configure the outging server settings by clicking on “Outgoing Server (SMTP)”, selecting the email address, and click “Edit”.

Once you have set the outgoing mail settings as noted earlier, click OK to the various dialogs to save.

9. You will now note that you have the email address showing up in the Thunderbird inbox …

If you want to have incoming email of this account go to the global inbox, this can be set in a later step.

10. If you go back to the Account Settings dialog, there are more email settings in Thunderbird that you should go through to check if they are your preferences.

Click on the main email account setting as shown …

and make sure that the reply-to and the outgoing server is correct.

11. Thunderbird Server settings…

Clicking on the Advanced button, you can set it to have incoming emails go to the global inbox by setting as shown …

You may also want to checkmark “Include this server when getting new mail”.

When doing so, it does provide the following warning…

12. For the “Copies & Folders” settings, I like to put the folder as “Local Folders” …

13. For composition and addressing setting, I like to set my reply above the quote …

14. If you want to filter out junk mail manually (because sometime spam filters make mistake and filter out good emails), then you can uncheck this box in the Junk Settings…

15. Not much adjusting needed for Thunderbird disk space setting …

or for Thunderbird Return Receipt settings …

or for the security settings …

16. Test your email account to make sure everything is working by sending an email to yourself from yourself or from another email account. The first time you send from this account, Thunderbird may prompt you for password …

If you don’t want Thunderbird to prompt you every time, you can checkmark to Use Password Manager to remember it for you.

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