Prior to 2024-6-19 (??date may need changing), instructions for setting up Thunderbird were in an HTML web page https://www.ncf.ca/ncf/support/mail_thunderbird3.html. This page dealt with a single email provider and none of the additional features of Thunderbird. It is also possible that the recommended settings may be sub-optimal or not work.
While some of the following information may be gathered by Thunderbird itself as we set it up for a particular NCF member, it is useful to have it saved somewhere safe for reference and security. The list of information has been mentioned already in the Email (currently draft??) page. You may also want to know the URL (i.e., address) of your Calendar. If you are going to use your NCF Zimbra Calendar, then you will want the ICS URL that you can find using the following steps:
with other users, but we just want the ICS URL at the bottom.
The ICS URL for NCF member zz999 will be
https://mail.ncf.ca/home/zz999@ncf.ca/Calendar.ics
You can generally copy the text of the URL by Right-Click on it, so it is easy to paste into the Calendar settings of Thunderbird or into a file where this information will be saved.
Installers for Thunderbird can be found and downloaded from https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/
Install Thunderbird either by running the downloaded installer or via your operating system’s package manager.
Thunderbird is a large and busy application. We will not cover all possibilities here.
Generally, Thunderbird should now be able to send and receive email. If you have another email, or a friend willing to help, send a short test message and ask for a reply to test that the email is working.
Thunderbird supports using multiple calendars. Here we will look at just setting up your NCF calendar. Let us suppose your NCF account is zz999.
Thunderbird tries to find the calendar definition files, but because there are many variations on how the URLs are specified, you likely will need to enter the address of the Calendar.ics file for your account.
Note that you can subscribe to more than one calendar if you have permission to access them. Be aware that calendar setup can often be quite tricky.
Address books or Contacts files are often troublesome to keep tidy and to share across applications. Sadly, they are also the files that outsiders, both hackers and corporations like Google and Microsoft, want to get their hands on. Thunderbird will gather email addresses into your “personal” address book from incoming emails. However, you may wish to use existing contacts. Thunderbird can “import” various address book file types (vCard, LDIF, SQLite, mab, csv). Comma Separated Value (csv) files have the nice feature that they are very easily imported into spreadsheets for viewing and organizing, but you do need to export them again if you want to bring the edited version into Thunderbird. We recommend clicking on the “Import” link and responding to the dialogs. Be sure to check the resulting collection of contacts.
Use the instructions under Basic Thunderbird Configuration to access Account Settings. From this, under Account Actions you can access the dialogs for adding feeds etc.
You can add another email from Account Settings / Account Actions in the same manner as the initial email. The accounts will both appear in the sidebar of Thunderbird. However, if you then look at Account Settings you will see both accounts but also a separate line Outgoing Server (SMTP). Clicking on that line will show “Outgoing Server (SMTP) Settings” and usually the servers for both email identities will appear, but one will be the default. You can change this if you wish. When replying to a message, the outgoing server for the email address that received the message will be used. The “default” is only used when you click on a “mailto:” link or perform some similar action where the account is not specified.
Thunderbird allows a lot of choices in how it works and appears. Possibly the most important is how Right Click on the account or folders in the left hand sidebar allows folders to be created, moved or deleted. A particularly nice feature is that you can highlight messages in the message list and move them between accounts and account folders. Very helpful to keep mail orderly. There are also “Local Folders”. You can choose where these appear in your file storage by Right Click on the Local Folders and choosing a directory other than the default, which generally is more or less hidden or out of the way. It can be helpful to have a “LocalMail” directory tree to archive mail and back it up.
Like many other programs, Thunderbird allows Extensions or Add-Ins. See https://addons.thunderbird.net. These can be accessed and installed from within Thunderbird. We recommend only installing the add-ons that you really need to avoid enlarging the complexity of your installation and corresponding risk of bugs or hacking. Moreover, the add-ons are almost always third-party software, and their correctness and maintenance is not guaranteed. Nevertheless, some will be important for some users, such as tools to synchronize address books across more than one computer. For example, you may have a desktop machine and a laptop, as well as a mobile phone. Or you and your partner may want to share a set of family email contacts.