If you are using an older version before Thunderbird 12 refer to our Thunderbird 3 guide or our old thunderbird guide.

Thunderbird 12 should automatically detect most of the proper mail settings simply by entering your name, e-mail address, and password.

astro.umn.edu email addresses are aliases for physics.umn.edu email accounts. For automatic setup to work if your email address ends in astro.umn.edu you should change it to end in physics.umn.edu.

Fill out the information (your name, your physics e-mail address, and then your password) as shown in the screenshot below. Select the “Continue” button

Thunderbird will look up the information associated with your account. It should look like below. Unfortunately, it's a little wrong. Select the “Manual Config” button.

The prompt will change to have boxes as below. The two objects we are concerned with are under “Authentication”.

Change the “Authentication” drop down menus to be “Normal Password”. If the rest of the information matches exactly, select “Create Account”.

Thunderbird 12 does several things which can be annoying.

First, it tries to synchronize your entire mail collection onto your local computer, which can be slow (especially from home). Second, it builds a full-text index of your messages for easier searching, but this can also be slow and is unneccessary because the mail server already provides that function.

To switch off synchronization, go to Tools → Account Settings → (account) → Synchronization & Storage for each account, and uncheck “Keep messages for this account on this computer”.

To disable the search index, go to Tools → Options → Advanced → General and switch off “Enable Global Search and Indexer”

When you want to run an extensive search of your messages, the search box has an option “Run search on server”, which will give much faster results.