Mac Training Guide!

Mozilla is putting all its energy in the new Developer Release of Thunderbird Beta 3, a new alternative to Apple Mail, its popularity is growing day by day and while Thunderbird won’t displace Apple Mail any day soon, it is becoming a powerful and viable alternative. We spent a week using Thunderbird as our main Email Application and this new Release showed that it’s mature enough to take over Apple Mail any time you want it.

Here is a detailed Step by Step Email Account Setting tutorial:

1. Choosing what kind of Account Setup.

When you first launch Thunderbird a splash screen asks for you to choose what kind of account you will setup, an Email Account a .Mac, RSS and Blog, Google Mail IMAP and Google Mail POP or Newsgroup, this is an easy to follow configuration.

2. Identification and Email Address.

In this screen you need to provide a Nane for the Account and the Email Address attached to it.

3. Incoming and Outgoing Mail Servers.

In this place you need to provide the Incoming and Outgoing Mail Servers that will handle your Emails. In this screen you can choose between POP and IMAP for your account. Check with your ISP about this information.

4. Incoming User Name = User Account.

This is where you type the username for your Email Account. Thunderbird replace the Outgoing User Name taking the Incoming User Name as a reference.

5. Account Name.

This is the identification of your Email Account Configuration, this is used to identify your different Emails Accounts in Thunderbird.

6. The Congratulation Screen.

This is a summary of the information you supplied to Thunderbird. You can now proceed to download all you email.

7. Welcome Home.

You can set Thunderbird as your Default Email and RSS Feed reader.

8. Your Password belongs to You.

Thunderbird lets you know how your password will be used, store or share. Thunderbird implements something called Master Password, a place where you store all your Mail Accounts Passwords into one Master Password, something similar to Keychain in Mac OS X.

You can access the Master Password in the Privacy Section of your Thunderbird Preferences or pressing (Command+,).

9. Junk Mail Filtering.

Thunderbird comes with a sophisticated Junk Mail System that filters your spam from reaching your Mailbox.

10. Managing Local Folders

If you click over the Account Name (in this case: Mactrainingguide) you can view and edit all the settings to this account, create a new mail account, search for information inside your messages or create message Filters, something similar to Rules in Apple Mail.

11. Thunderbird Message Filters

You can set Message Filters to help you organize your Mailbox, placing each mail in its respetive Folder or setting actions depending on what kind of email we have receive (setting junk status, replying, forwarding, moving to different mailbox, marking as read or unread and many more).

12. Animated Help

Thunderbird puts its Help System to work dynamically, it directs you to the right Option to choose when searching for help.

13. Sending Rich or Plain Email

You can send rich html based emails or just Plain Text, you can set your choice by going to the Options Menu and selecting Format, the Option menu is only available when you are sending mails.

14. Formating Text

In the Format Menu you can change your Font type, size, color, assign different Text Styles, create lists, insert tables, color background, align your text and create Headlines based on the presets that comes with Thunderbird.

15. Sending Attachments.

You can attach files to any email in 3 different ways; a) Just by clicking the Attachment Clip on the Icon bar; b) dragging your image or images to the body of the email or; c) by clicking in the Attachment Area in the upper right corner of your email windows, notice that the Attachment Area is only visible after attaching a file by using the first option here. If you press Control+Click in the Attachment Area, a drop down menu will let you choose from different Attachment options, even will let you send a web page as an attachment.

16. Getting Mails
You can choose to check mails for one or multiple accounts, this is a nice feature, We waist too much time waiting for our non-critical email accounts to finish in order to get the one We need.

17. Propietary and System based Address Books
Thunderbird comes with 2 different Address Books, the Mac OS X based Address Book and a Proprietary System that lets you classify your addresses, you can assign which one to use.

18. Extension – Add-Ons
One thing that make Thunderbird is its community heritage, thousand of developers fine tuning, creating extensions or add-ons to give the application more features and powers. You can download hundreds of mini programs and make Thunderbirds your Email program of choice.

19. RSS and Newsgroups

You can download your favorite RSS Feed, set if you like a Summary or the Complete Feed, organize, import and export your previous Feeds. Thunderbird can be set as your Default RSS Reader for your System.

20. Tags to color your Mails

Tags are a creative way to mark the relevance of any received email, you can select the mail or mails and choose the Tag needed from the Tab Bar.

Summary
Thunderbird is a Mature, beautifully designed and ultra powerful Email Client, with Thunderbird Mozilla has a winning ticket and has earned my respect. In some area it may behaves like Microsoft Outlook, but lets not forget that this is Mozilla main target. In general this is a polished Application, a real Mac App with excellent features and not string attached.