Modifying your account settings in Mozilla Thunderbird

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Modifying your account settings in Mozilla Thunderbird

Monday 21st January 2008

This article describes how to modify the basic account settings in Mozilla Thunderbird to achieve various end results including:

fixing problems with sending and receiving emails
making your sent emails appear more professional (and law-abiding in the UK)
telling Thunderbird what to do on start up

To modify your Account Settings go to Tools > Account Settings

The Account Settings window will open. On the left you'll see the names of your email accounts with links below for:

Server Settings
Copies & Folders
Composition & Addresses
Disk Space
Return receipts
Security

and at the very bottom, beneath your email accounts you'll see a link for the Outgoing Server (SMTP) Settings. Select the email account you want to modify. You'll see the default settings for this account.

Account Name

This is name of the account and is only used to display within Thunderbird, so you can name it anything at all.

Default Identity

Fill in the blanks with suitable details. It's usually a good idea to have the Reply-to Address the same as the default Email Address but on occasion you may want to change this; e.g. if you don't want replies to a particular email you could change the Return-to Address to something like donotreply@bloggsclogs.net and (ensuring that this 'donotreply' email address has been configured correctly by your web site technical support team) people won't be able to reply to your email.

NB. the Default Identity information is visible to your email recipients, so ensure it is correct and meaningful.

Attach a Signature

Attaching a Signature to the end of your emails is vitally important - and in the UK it is required by law to include specific details like your company registration number in your Signature (further information about the legal requirements of email footers in the UK).

The information you provide in your Signature can vary. Here's some examples:

Name
Job title
Email address
Telephone number
Business name
Business address
Company registration number (if a registered company)
Website address
A marketing slogan or quotation

And here's an example Signature to start you off:

--- 
Joe Bloggs
Production Manager
joe@bloggs.com
01234567890
Joe Bloggs Ltd
100 Bloggs Business Park
Big City
UK
http://www.bloggs.com
Registered Company Number: ABC123456789
----------------------------------------
Choose Bloggs for Clogs

Attach a vCard

A vCard and a Signature are very similar in that they both contain all the contact and legal information about you and your company or business. The main difference between them is the vCard can be downloaded by your email recipients and automatically added to their address books, which makes it a very useful tool to consider including within your emails.

Here's what your Signature and vCard can look like to a recipient.

example signature and vCard

Server Settings

The server details you entered when you first set up this account can be edited under the Server Settings link (so this is where you change things like the Server Name (e.g. mail.bloggsclogs.net) and User Name if you made a mistake).

Another couple of settings you can change here are the options to automatically check for new messages on start up and periodically at your own specified time periods.

Copies & Folders

One considerable advantage of using Thunderbird (over some web-based email clients) is that all your outgoing messages are saved, which means that if you ever need to refer to an old piece of correspondence then you will always have a copy stored on your computer.

TIP: If your emails are important to your business, then making backups (onto a CD or remote location) of your sent (and received) emails is a good idea, just in case something disastrous happens with your computer.

To find out where your emails are saved you'll find the location by selecting 'Server Settings' under your email account and at the bottom there should be a reference to the 'local directory' where you'll find all emails stored.

Composition & Addressing

Thunderbird comes with a Rich Text Editor which allows you to create your messages using features like bold / italic / headings / different font styles and colours / embedded images and hyperlinks etc. To enable this you'll need to select the checkbox in this section.

Outgoing Server (SMTP)

The Outgoing Server is where your message gets sent to before getting delivered to your recipient. Your messages won't be sent successfully if you don't have the correct details entered for the Outgoing Server.

And that's all the basic Account Settings you'll need to update to get started with Thunderbird.

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