Many people know and love Outlook as the end all be all of email & calendaring. I’m not one of them. I split my time between Outlook at work (stupid exchange server) and Thunderbird and Mail.app at home. If you’re tired of Outlook then let’s switch (painlessly) to Thunderbird and allow me to tell you how to get started with this free (as in beer) alternative combination that kicks Outlook’s ass.
First off the main reasons to change:
- It’s FREE (again as in beer).
- No license, No need to take up 500+ MB of storage.
- Just like it’s older brother Firefox it has regular updates and patches to keep it stable and secure.
- Multiplatform. (I run it on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)
- On top of that Thunderbird offers the ability for themes and addons to make your email and scheduling woes faded memories.
Ok let’s get started with Thunderbird by installing it:
Download Thunderbird & Lightning: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/]
Download the installer file from the page above, and double-click the file. Make sure you’ve closed all of the other apps you’re running (general advice but you can feel free to ignore it).
Read the agreement (or just choose accept and click next).
It should look similar to the above (unless you chose a different place to install to). Click next.
Click finish and you’re done installing (and you’re also starting Thunderbird for the first time).
Let’s configurate!
When you open Thunderbird for the first time, you need to create a new account, I will try to show you this step by step.
First click on “Create a new account”.
Select “Email account” and press next.
Fill in your name and email address, press next.
Now you are asked to fill in the incoming server, for me it’s “mail.gmail.com”, you may be asked for outgoing server aswell, usually this is the same server, press next.
You may have noticed I chose IMAP for server type. That’s a whole other post to figure out which is best for you. In a nutshell IMAP = syncs your mailbox so if you read email on a laptop and at work you only need to mark it read once and all other devices will reflect that.
Now you are asked to fill in your user name for your email provider, for example “jsmith”, press next.
Now you are asked what you would like to call this account, (I chose the email address for this example but you can choose anything you’d like), press next.
You will get a summary, check your information, and if everything is OK press finish.
Mark your email address and press “Get mail”.
You’ll be asked for the password to your email account, carefully type it in and check the box that says “save password” if you only want to have to enter it once. That way you won’t get asked again.
There you have it, you’re now using Thunderbird. Fun isn’t it?
Some of you more observant folks may have noticed that there is a calendar on the right side of Thunderbird screen above. That’s coming later this week in part two where I show you how to leverage the power of Thunderbird’s extensibility by installing Lightning and more.
