Thunderbird Tutorial
To install Thunderbird go to: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/
This should have the latest version of thunderbird on the page. Click on the free download button and it’ll take you to a new page. A popup will appear. Click on Save File. After you have finished downloading this, double click the newly downloaded .exe file. Follow the setup wizard and install Thunderbird. After you have finished installing, bring up Thunderbird and the mail account setup window should pop up.
Type in your name, email, and password into the fields accordingly and click continue. When you click continue, it will search for the correct incoming and outgoing server name and port according to your email.
If you know this information, then you can go to Manual Setup… at the bottom left corner. This will bring up
In here, you will be able to set up your server names and ports numbers. After you have the server names set up, you can look through the options and set them accordingly.
After you finish with the setting, click on OK. This will bring you to the main Thunderbird page. On the upper left hand corner is a Get Mail button. Click on this. If you have set your incoming server correctly, you should be able to get all your emails.
Now you want to compose a message and send it to see if you have set the outgoing server correctly also.
If you are moving from one workstation to another and have emails you want to move to this new workstation, then you need to perform these actions:
- First you must get on the computer with the emails. Once there, you want to go to the windows explorer or click on “My Computer.” In the address bar on the top, you want to type “%AppData%” and hit enter. This will take you to the applications directory.
- Within this directory, find the folder call Thunderbird or Mozilla-Thunderbird. Go into this directory
- In this directory look for the profiles folder. Go in there.
- In here, you have the different profiles set on your Thunderbird. Go into the profile. They should all be named xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.default with the “x” being random numbers and letters.
- Within this directory, you should see several folders and files. You want to take a look at Mail or ImapMail. If you are using a Pop server then you want to go to Mail. If you are using Imap, then go to ImapMail.
- In here, you want to locate the folder that is named after the email that you want to backup. Go into that folder.
- Now that you are in the folder, you should see several files. These files are named after the email folder they appear as on your Thunderbird. So you should see Inbox, Sent, etc. You will also see files with the extension .msf. You may ignore these files.
- Now copy and paste the files that you want to backup onto a flash drive or put it in a shared network so you can access these files later.
- Now, you want to get back onto the new computer that you want these emails to be on. Once again go into the windows explorer or click on “My Computer” and type %AppData% in the address. Go through the same folders (Thunderbird > Profiles > xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.default > ImapMail (or Mail).
- If you have set up your new account properly, there should be a new folder within ImapMail or Mail with your email address as the folder name. Copy and paste all the files that you have backed up into this folder.
- If your Thunderbird is currently on, please exit out of the program and then turn go back on. This will index all your new emails.
To install Lightning, the Calendar extension to Thunderbird, you want to:
- Open up Thunderbird and go Tools > Add-Ons > Get Add-Ons. Then you want to search for Lighting in the search field.
- You should find Lighting. You then want to click on the “Add to Thunderbird…” button. This should only take a couple seconds. When it is done, you should see a prompt to restart Thunderbird. After it has restarted, you will see the added calendar function to your Thunderbird.
To sync your Google Calendar, or Zimbra Calendar with your Thunderbird, follow these steps:
- First you want to go to Tools >Add-On> Get Add-Ons. Then do a search for “Provider for Google Calendar.” Add this Add-On to your Thunderbird.
- Then go to your Calendar and right click on Home and Select “New Calendar…”
- This will bring up a window. You want to select “On the Network”
- Now we are going to start with syncing Google Calendar. To Sync with Google Calendar, you want to go on the internet and log onto your Google Account and go to your Calendar. Click on Settings in the top right corner of the web page.
- On the next page you want to click on the Calendars tab.
- Then on the Calendars page, you want to click on the link to your calendar.
- Then on the bottom, you should see Private Address: and three buttons that says XML, ICAL, and HTML. Right click on XML and copy the link location.
- If you want to sync the calendar with Zimbra, you want to first log into Zimbra.
- Then go to the Calendar tab. Then on the left side, you want to right click on the Calendar and select Share Calendar
- Then you want to go to the bottom. Beside ICS: you should see a URL. Right click on that and copy the link location.
- Now go back to Thunderbird to create that new calendar. Depending on which calendar you are trying to sync, you choose iCalendar for Zimbra, and Google Calendar for your Google Calendar. In the Location field if where you enter the URL you copied. Then click on Next.
- On the next window, you want to select the name of the Calendar and choose a color for it. This color you choose will be the color the events from that Calendar will be highlighted in. This is a nice way to determine from which Calendar an event is from.
- Click Next and Finish. You have now synced Google Calendar and Thunderbird.
Tags: Calendar, Email, Google Calendar, Syncing, thunderbird, Zimbra