After setting up an email account, as explained in
153 Create an Email Account , you're ready to begin using Thunderbird to manage your email. The first thing you'll probably want to do is to check and see if you have any new messages. After you receive an email message, you can read through it, reply to it, forward it to someone else, and add the person who sent you the message to your address book.
You can import mail from your old email program if you like, or you can start fresh in Thunderbird and import only new messages as described in this task. To import mail from another program, choose
Tools, Import from the menu. In the
Import dialog box, select
Mail and click
Next . Select your old email program from the next screen and click
Next again. You'll see a message telling you how many messages were imported into Thunderbird; click
1. | Click Get Mail By default, Thunderbird checks for new messages every 10 minutes and notifies you if there are any new ones. In most cases, Thunderbird also retrieves those messages for you. However, to retrieve new email messages now instead of waiting for 10 minutes, click the Get Mail button on the Mail toolbar. 154. Get Your Email
161 Organize Incoming Mail .) So, if needed, click the folder that contains the message you want to read. Messages in that folder appear in a list on the right side of the Thunderbird window. Unread messages appear in bold; the number of unread messages in the current folder appears in the status bar. To view a message, click its header. The message content appears in a viewing pane below the message header listing. You can change the location and size of this viewing pane by selecting the view you want to use from the View, Layout menu. Some messages contain images that are not displayed; if you want to view such images, click the Show Images button that appears just above the view pane. Some messages have files attached to them. These messages are identified with a small paper clip icon in front of their subject line in the message header listing. When you view a message with file(s) attached, the attachments are listed below the message text in the view pane. See 158 Attach a File to a Message for help in viewing and saving such attachments. |
4. | Label Message if Desired If you want, you can label a message as important, work related, personal, and so on. Each label type is a different color, and when you assign a label to a message, the message's header appears in that color, making the message easy to identify.155 Find a Message . |