Thread: I'm having some trouble with the info needed to sign up with Mozilla Thunderbird.

"Outgoing Mail Server - use your local ISP SMTP mail server." I'm saigning up with Thunderbird, and this site says that for mail.com this is the information you need to find and enter as your outgoing mail server.


WHERE DO I FIND THIS INFORMATION? My ISP is comcast (I think). So, what?



Oh yeah, I don't need the information of the first post.

"Outgoing Mail Server - use your local ISP SMTP mail server." I'm saigning up with Thunderbird, and this site says that for mail.com this is the information you need to find and enter as your outgoing mail server.


WHERE DO I FIND THIS INFORMATION? My ISP is comcast (I think). So, what?



Oh yeah, I don't need the information of the first post.

There is no "signing up" for Thunderbird. It is not an email account, but a email client. Think Microsoft Outlook. This is just a program that you use to view different POP, IMAP, and other push/pull accounts.

First, you will need either a pay email service (like a registered email name you made up and pay for. Some come with domain name packages, other can be bought alone. ie: yourname@yourdomain.com) or some free webmail have POP access.

Once you have one of those, you need to find the POP and SMTP incoming and outgoing servers. For example is your email is "yourname@yourdomain.com", a likely POP server would be "pop.yourdomain.com" and the same for SMTP, "smtp.yourdomain.com". Other could be "mail.yourdomain.com", but there are no exact rules.

I think Comcast has POP service with a braodband subscription. Just call the tech center and ask for the POP and SMTP servers for your account. You will then need to set up a user name and password in the webmail first, then the client.

_________________

Email clients are much more robust than webmail. They interface with other programs (calendars, mobile phone sync, etc), and can have multiple accounts in one place (I have 15 in this one program). You can write an email, and then decide which account you want to send it. All of the email and attachments you receive is stored on your drive of choice.

Here are my tips to bypass the paying hassle. It can be done freely and with all the possibilities used.

Create a free mail account on Yahoo, Hotmail or Tiscali (where Tiscali already has free POP, but not SMTP!) - if you don't already have one.

Find a friend here at AO who would send you a GMail invitation. Provide you tiscali/anything email address.

Use the web interface of the tiscali/whatever service to view your invitation. Click on the invitation link and do your subscription to Google Mail carefully.

Once it's successful, continue to it's Properties (still in the web interface of Gmail) and enable POP as also hinted in the help. Save. Invoke Help and see how to setup Thunderbird.

Run Thunderbird and mimic the settings described in the Gmail help.

That's it, you can now receive and send your messages securely with Thunderbird!

If you ask why would you undergo such a hassle instead of just using webmail, the answer is that no webmail will offer you the size of your harddisk, offline operation, HTML message editing, self-learning spam filtering etc.

But since you didn't know what is Thunderbird for in the first place, I suggest that you just don't touch anything and stick with Hotmail and such.

why don't you sign up on gmail, it has more than 2Gb of space for your mail, and you can use it in thunderbird, you have detailed instructions how to make it work correctly

thats the easiest way

edit:

oh, i see that zdenek wrote this already...

anyway when you create your gmail account you'll need this info

pop3: pop.gmail.com
smtp: smtp.gmail.com

username [account name]: username that you registred
password: password that you registered

you will have to enable ssl in advanced tab for pop and smtp... and you will have to write in port section

pop: 465
smtp: 995

and thats it [for OE] XD

i'll write you detailed info how to make it work in thunderbird, here on work we have only OE and MSOutlook...