Thunder Bird Email Guide: Sending & Receiving Mail

Sending Mail

Once connected to Thunderbird, click on the write button, or go to Message->New Message and the compose new mesage box will come up.

Receiving Your Mail

When opening your Thunderbird client it will automatically connect to mail server and look for new mail. It will then be downloaded to your domestic inbox, viewed as a subfolder of your email address on the left. Click on the inbox and your mail messages will show to the right.

Having Thunderbird up and idle, you need to press the Get mail button to make the client check for new messages, unless you've told Thunderbird to check for messages automatically (this is possible under Tools -> Account settings).

Thunderbird Toolbar

Here is a list of the buttons on the toolbar and a brief description of what they do.
	Get Mail The get mail button will connect your Thunderbird client to your mail server and look for new messages. In the bottom left corner you will get a message if you have new email.
	Write The write button opens a new window, where you can write your mail, edit attachments and send it.
	Address Book The adress book is an area for storing adresses to frequently used contacts. This is covered in more detail later.
	Reply The reply button will open and new window, including the text from the mail highlighted in your inbox.
	Reply All Will include all recipients of the email replied to, i.e. everybody listed in the To or Copy field will receive the reply.
	Forward The forward button opens a new window, with the highlighted message either as an attachment, or inlined (included as text) in the new message.
	Delete The delete button will delete the highlighted mail message.
	Junk The junk button will mark the highlighted message as spam.
	Print Prints the selected message.
	Stop The stop button will abort the current event, useful for example if you want to abort sending a big message, or stop downloading thousands of messages from newsgroups.
Options
	To get to the Options menu, click on Tools, and the last item on the menu should be Options... In this section there are several options on how to configure your application.
Address Book
	New Card This button will allow you to create a new card in your address book, a new card can be a contact person, business relations, etc.
	New List This button will open a window where you can create and/or edit an existing mailing list.
	Properties Lets you change the highlighted card
	Write Opens a new window for writing a message to the person highlighted in the address book.
	Delete Deletes the highlighted card from the address book.
Attachments
	The first thing you need to do to add an attachment is to open a new message. Then you can click on the attach button. Right next to the attachment button is there also an arrow; you've got 2 choices, either attach a file or a web address. After clicking on the attachment button or drop-down arrow , and either a window for browsing your folders on your hard drive will appear or a line for you to type in the site for the webpage you wish to attach. Locate the file you want to attach from your local directory, and press open. Your mail message has now a file attached. If you want to add more attachments to the same email all you have to do is repeat the process. If you want to attach a web page, choose "Attach web page" and fill in the URL of the page you want to attach.