The Thunderbird add-on is available for all versions of Thunderbird 2. It is currently available as a experimental add-on at the Mozilla website from where it has to be downloaded before it can be installed in Thunderbird.

The add-on will add a drop down menu to the Send button in the Thunderbird email client which will list the available SMTP servers and an option to add a new SMTP server to use it to send the emails.

Selecting any of the available SMTP servers will send the message by connecting to the specified server.

I had some troubles in the past setting up POP3 and SMTP access for Gmail and a quick check on the Internet revealed that many users had similar difficulties. It actually took me 20 minutes to setup the new account in the email client Thunderbird correctly so that it would receive and send emails using Gmail’s servers.

While the following guide will visualize the settings in Thunderbird it can easily be adopted for other mail clients. The important parts are the server settings and not the menus.

POP3 access has to be enabled in the Gmail interface before anyone can even think of adding a Gmail account to a software email client. This is done by logging into the web interface of Gmail and clicking on the Settings link in the upper right corner next to the email address.

A menu with multiple tabs will open. Select the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Checking the Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) entry and clicking on Save Settings will enable POP3 access for the Gmail account. If that would not be done the server would simply refuse the connection.

Everthing is set in Gmail, now it is time to setup the email client. Here are the general parameters:

Incoming server: pop3.gmail.com
Port: 995
User name: full email address
Secure Connection: SSL

Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com
Port: 587
Secure Connection: TLS
User name: full email address

The main culprit are the port numbers and the secure connection settings. If you have any questions or difficulties setting this up let us know. It would also be nice to hear if other email clients use different names for the settings.

A component is a plugin for one of the mentioned email services which means that if you use AOL and Yahoo Mail you would download and install those two. The main advantage of webmail is that you can configure all settings in Thunderbird without having to run an external software that listens on the mail port.

Setup involves three steps. First you make sure that webmail is up and running. You do that by opening the options of webmail. It should display a graphic that looks similar to the one below.

If everything is up and running select domains from the tab bar and make sure that the webmail providers that you use are in the list. If that is the case exit the options.It’s time to create a new account to retrieve and check email from those webmail accounts.

POP3:

Server Type : POP
Incoming Server : localhost
username: your email address which has to include the domain, e.g. @yahoo.com

SMTP:

Server Name : localhost
User Name : your email address which has to include the domain, e.g. @yahoo.com

Check out the setup guide if you are unsure about this, it explains every step with pictures. My thanks to Si Howard for pointing this out. Another option would be Freepops that I wrote about as well.

The second change might be interesting to users that have to work on different computers. Gmail now offers the option to access mail accounts that support the pop3 protocol from within gmail making it easy to use gmail as the central platform for all your incoming and outgoing emails. This new feature does not seem to be available to anyone yet, just check your settings in the gmail account and click on accounts.

If the option Get mail from other accounts: is visible you can add other accounts to your gmail account. I’m however not really convinced to use gmail for my mail consolidation and administration. I have the same objections when it comes to online storage devices.

I do not trust companies enough to have important mails or files stored online on a server. There is always the possibility of misuse and I don’t want to take any risks. Maybe I’m a little paranoid about this whole thing.

Still, I will continue to download my mails from gmail using Thunderbird and I’m happy with the solution. Mainly because I only work on one computer. I can see the advantages if you work on more than one in different locations.

Update: Four years later and Gmail is still offering to retrieve mail from other providers. Providers like Hotmail have in the meantime started to offer similar options so that their users can also retrieve emails via Pop3 from other mail providers. This is handy for users who only use a website to do email.

All you need to do is locate the file user.js which should be in your profiles folder. The user.js file does not exist by default and you might need to create it my right-clicking and choosing new, text document and naming it user.js. Once this is done you are ready to add the following lines of code to it.

user_pref(“mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new”, true);
user_pref(“mail.check_all_pop_folders_for_new”, true);

Once this is done restart thunderbird and mail from all accounts should be automatically received.