Thunderbird Email and News client

General info about Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a easy to use email client, but it has advanced features if you need them. There is also good deal of extentions(add-ons) which include different user requests features that's not yet in the main program. The latest version of the client can be downloaded from the official homepage.

Thunderbird as an email program

The first thing you should do is to download the latest version and run the installer. Choose Complete Installation to get all the components. During installation or at the first start of the program you may be asked to import settings from your previous mail program.

If you want to import your old email, adressbook and settings please note that Thunderbird only makes af copy, you can still use the your old email program. If the settings are not imported correctly or you're setting up your email account for the first time go in the menu Tools - Account Settings.

The first thing you need to choose is what type of account you want to create. Choose Email. How to set up a News account will be explained later in this guide.

After Choosing Email as account type you need to type in what Name and Email adress the account shall be tied to. The Email adress is the adress you want Thunderbird to check and connect to.

The next thing you need to fill out is what type of email connection you want to use.If you are connecting to your NTNU account you have to use IMAP and Imap.stud.ntnu.no is the full adress. Outgoing server adress is smtp.stud.ntnu.no if you are on NTNU's computer network. If you're using a different internet provider than NTNU you need to use their Outgoing server. Information about what your internet providers outgoing email server is either in the signup information you got when you ordered the connection or alternatively, avaliable on the internet service provider's homepage.

The username for the account is the name infront of the "@" in your email adress.

The name of the account can be whatever you want it to be, either the default username@stud.ntnu.no, or anything else.

Check that all the information is correct and press Finish.

This is how the main view will look like after you've created an email account. The next thing you should do is to choose what folders you want to subscribe to on the account and how the junk mail filter should handle spam email.

To select what folders you want to display and fetch from the email server right click on your email account and select Subscribe. A list of the different folders on your email account will be displayed. Mark the folders you want thunderbird to download and check for new emails.

Junkmailfileret i Thunderbird

The junk mail sorting in Thunderbird are done by training up an intelligent filter which sort out whats spam email to a separate folder and pr default delete it after a set amount of time.

By default email which is downloadad and classified as spam will be sorted to a spam folder where it will remain for 14 days before its deleted.

Thunderbird som Newsleser og RSSleser

If you want to use Thunderbird to read news you first need to set up an news account. The information you need to fill out is your email adress, name and the adress of the news server you want to connect to.

NTNU has a news server you can access if you're on NTNU's computer network. The adress to the news server is news.ntnu.no.

To subscribe to a news group you rightclick on the news server and select subscribe. You can either page through the news tree yourself or search by key words to find matching news groups.

When you subscribe to a group and want to get it's messages for the first time you'll get a question if you want to download all the current messages in the news group. As you can see on the picture above this can be quite a big amount. But, since most news groups only allow posting of text and you presumably are on NTNU's computer network, downloading all off the current messages should not be a problem.

A subscribed and downloaded news group will look something like this.

Thunderbird had and adress book that works like most other email programs adress books. Interesting features are automatic searching on maps for residential adresses you add and whether or not the recipient want to get html or text formatted emails. You can import form most other common adress book formats.

Andre ressurser

Cyberia has a nice little guide, among other things about how to change the configuration files and shortcut keys. Om this page there is also a nice overview of all the different settings you can change in the config files.