Setting Up Your Mail in Thunderbird

This guide assumes you already have a mail account setup in our Plesk Control panel and know your mail password. If you haven’t done so, please follow our guide for creating a mail account in Plesk before proceeding.

1. Open Mozilla Thunderbird

If you do not already have Thunderbird installed, please visit their site to download and install it. If you’re using a version of Thunderbird that is older than v17, please be sure to update before proceeding as this guide has been updated and will not match what you see with earlier versions. Once downloaded and installed, Thunderbird can be found as an icon on the desktop entitled “Mozilla Thunderbird” or from the Start Menu under ‘All Programs/Mozilla Thunderbird/Mozilla Thunderbird.’

2. Add a New Account

When you launch Thunderbird for the first time you will be prompted to create a new account. If you have already launched Thunderbird and are not presented with the Account Wizard, please choose Tools > Account Settings > Add Account.

3. Configure Your Identity

Enter your name, email address and password in the provided fields.

4. Let Thunderbird handle the rest

Lucky for us, Thunderbird knows how to communicate with your Websavers hosted email account and sets everything up automatically for you.

If you’ve seen our email configuration before, you’ll be surprised to see that your full email address is *not* being used for the username. Thunderbird will automatically discover that the full email address is required and change it up when you click Done.

As you can see, the Incoming and Outgoing Server fields should both be already set to mail.yourdomain.com. It also automatically configures your account for STARTTLS security.

You may then wish to adjust the configuration and replace mail.yourdomain.com with the server hostname as described in our mail reference guide here. While mail.yourdomain.com will work (with an SSL warning about a mismatch that Thunderbird sometimes accepts for you), when we replace that SSL certificate in the future, it may begin to cause problems. Using the server hostname will avoid these types of issues because the hostname will match the SSL certificate.

We have learned that recent versions of Thunderbird are no longer configuring themselves correctly in some instances. We hope that will be fixed soon. In those cases, please use the mail reference guide to correct the settings.

5. Set Server Directory to INBOX

If you don’t already see the account settings window, right click on your newly created account name (yourname@domain.com) on the left and choose Settings. In the account settings window, choose “Server Settings” directly below your email account name. In the lower right corner, click the Advanced button to bring up the dialog I have overlaid in the bottom left of the screenshot.

Enter INBOX under the IMAP Server Directory, then click OK twice.

6. Restart Thunderbird

Close Thunderbird entirely, then re-open it for all of the settings to take effect.