Mozilla Thunderbird – Setup your account
This manual gives you information on how to setup your mail account in Mozilla Thunderbird:
1. In Thunderbird, hit the alt-key and select File > New > Existing Mail Account.
2. Enter your name, your full mail adress (either your default mail adress or your alias) and your password and hit continue
3. Thunderbird now detects the correct settings automatically. After that you can click Done and your setup was successfull.
Note: Please do not change from IMAP to POP3 if you are not aware of what you are doing.
Error „Incoming server already exists“
If you already have setup thunderbird with your default mail address (account@uni-koeln.de or account@smail.uni-koeln.de), you will not be able to add an alias this way as a whole new mail account (or vice versa). Due to the fact, that a mail alias does not include a new account, all your mails would be displayed twice since you have only one inbox, no matter if they are sent to your default account or to your alias.
Should you get that error, you can think about the following options:
- If you want to send your mails with your alias address as sender you could simply change the entered address in thunderbird to your alias address. Hit the alt-key and select Tools > Account settings. Choose the correct account and simply edit the address entered under Email Address.
- If you want to choose for each mail individually, you need to setup a new identity via the "Manage identity" option in "Account settings". For further instructions please see Setup identities in Thunderbird.
More than synchronizing mails
By setting up an e-mail account in Thunderbird as an IMAP account, you can also access your stock of e-mails from different devices and always have a consistent view of the status of your e-mail messages, for example, whether they have already been read, answered or forwarded.
In addition to e-mails, you can also use Thunderbird to synchronise appointments (calendar information) and task lists across multiple devices. Follow our instructions for calendar synchronisation if you also want to have this data uniformly available on all devices.
Contact
If you have any questions or problems, please contact the RRZK-Helpdesk