Technofunction

Mozilla thunderbird is the one of the most famous free open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla foundation.  You can easily receive mail from different mail providers on your desktop and can even store these mails on your local desktop alone. Further you can also remain updated with latest new around the globe or locally by using it. Mozilla thunderbird is just like Microsoft outlook express with only difference is that it supports both IMAP and POP3.  And also unlike outlook express it is open source and can be used equally well on various platforms including Linux. You can simply install thunderbird on Linux by downloading its package from the Mozilla’s site.

Here is a link to Mozilla thunderbird package

http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/

After downloading the package just follow the steps to install and configure an email client

• Navigate to the directory were you have downloaded the package (thunderbird-3.1.6.tar.bz2). In our case it is on the Desktop

# cd /root/Desktop

#ls

Look out for “thunderbird-3.1.6.tar.bz2”

• Next you need to install the package. For this you can use the following command

# tar –xvf thunderbird-3.1.6.tar.bz2    (where x=extract, v=verbose, f=from and next to it is archive file)

• This will extract the archive file and create a folder named “thunderbird”. You need to navigate to that folder

# cd thunderbird

• This folder contains all the files needed for thunderbird. You can run the thunderbird from here by using

# ./thunderbird

• This will open the Thunderbird initial screen for you .

Here you need to enter your name, email address and password.

• Next it will ask you to use IMAP or POP3 protocol. The major difference is that by using IMAP you have your mails on server also which you can access later for some other place also while pop3 downloads the actual message to your local PC. For most of the users default setting will work.

Just make sure IMAP is selected

• Next click on the create account. If you have entered the correct email and password it will download the mails for you.

• If you need to edit/change any information to your account on thunderbird you can do it via going to –àedit tab—àaccount settings. Here it stores the information about all your accounts including SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) which you need to provide in case you using e-mail other than Gmail.

Written by: Ankit on November 2, 2010.