Thunderbird:Help Documentation:Managing Your Accounts

If you have more than one e-mail address, or you subscribe to several newsgroups, you can use Mozilla Thunderbird to collect messages from all of them by creating multiple accounts. Each account can have its own server settings, inbox and other folders, or if you prefer, you can download all your e-mail into one Global Inbox. When you check for new messages, Thunderbird can check each account individually, or all of them simultaneously.

You can also set account options individually. For instance, you can tell Thunderbird to delete old messages from your personal e-mail account, but not from your work account. Or you can specify that you want to save a copy of your sent e-mail messages, but not your sent newsgroup messages.

Adding a new account

Before you can use Thunderbird to view and reply to messages for a particular account, you need to add the account to Thunderbird and provide key information about it.

To add a new account for e-mail, news, or RSS feeds:

1. Choose Tools > Account Settings….
2. In the Account Settings dialog box, click Add Account…. This displays the Account Wizard.

The Account Wizard guides you through the process of setting up a new account.

Information you will need

To enable Thunderbird to send and receive messages, the Account Wizard will ask for technical information about the account you’re setting up. If you’re unsure about any of this information, your e-mail provider or newsgroup should be able to supply it.

For an e-mail account, you will need to tell the Account Wizard:

• your e-mail address;
• your username and password for that account;
• whether your incoming server is a POP or IMAP server (ask your provider);
• the name of your incoming server (for example, pop.example.com or imap.example.com);
• the name of your outgoing server (for example, smtp.example.com), if you haven’t already set one up.

For a newsgroup, you will need to tell the Account Wizard:

• your e-mail address;
• the name of the newsgroup server (for example, news.example.net).

RSS feed accounts

You can create a new RSS feed account in exactly the same way as you create an e-mail or newsgroup account, using the Account Wizard. Once created, you can use a single RSS feed account to subscribe to as many RSS feeds as you like.

If you want to subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds, you can create multiple accounts with different names and use each one to subscribe to a different subset of feeds. For example, you may want to create one account called ‘News’ and another called ‘Blogs’. As with e-mail and newsgroup accounts, each RSS feed account can have its own folder and you can set options for each one individually.

[work in progress - more to add]