A Quick Rundown on Setting up Thunderbird (a FOSS desktop email client)

How to set up Thunderbird for your Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail accounts

1) Use the Automatic Setup Wizard

  1. Select the Service Provider (Yahoo, Hotmail, Google)

  2. Enter your credentials (address/username and password, and it should automatically connect and begin to download your emails.

  3. If that doesn’t work for some reason…

2) Use the Manual Setup Tool

  1. Gather the following information from your provider (each provider is a little different, in terms of where you find this info)

    1. incoming mail server and port (for example, “pop.example.com” and port 110 or “imap.example.com” and port 143)

    2. outgoing mail server and port (for example, “smtp.example.com” and port 25)

    3. security setting for the connection with the server (for example, “STARTTLS” or “SSL/TLS” and whether or not to use secure authentication)

  2. Input your credentials

  3. Click OK, and if you put everything in correctly, the process of downloading your emails should begin.