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Mozilla Thunderbird is a free Email client from the people that brought you Firefox. It’s fast, secure, and supports extensive plug-ins that add additional functionality. Thunderbird works under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. These instructions are for version 2.0

If you are opening Thunderbird for the first time, the new account setup screen will come up automatically. Otherwise, select Account Settings.. from the Tools menu. Click the Add Account… button.

Select the Email account button if it isn’t already selected, then click Continue.

Enter the name and email address you want to appear on your outgoing email:

Click continue, then choose if you want to use POP or IMAP. (see this tech note if you are unsure what to choose_

In either case, the server is mail.lmi.net for both Incoming and Outgoing Server

NOTE: If you are setting up a POP account, the Global Inbox option will appear. If you have multiple POP accounts setup in Thunderbird, you can click this option to have messages from each POP account show up in the same Inbox.

Now click Continue…

Your incoming user name is the actual server login name, not your full email address. After entering this, click Continue…

The Account name is the label by which this email account is titled. By default, it will be your email address, but you can enter any label you wish.

Click Continue and you will see a summary of your account settings. That’s it!

One other note: Some ISPs block access to SMTP servers outside their own network. If you are not using LMi for internet access, and have trouble sending mail, you may need to change the Outgoing server port in Thunderbird. See this tech note for details

Many people use the mail filters (also called mail rules) in their email client software to automatically file incoming mail into separate folder. This would allow all incoming email from a mailing list (for example) to be stored together in the same folder. But what if you often use 2 different computers to check mail, or if you have an iPhone, for example? You would need to setup mail filters on each computer individually. The iPhone doesn’t even support mail filtering.

One of the best new features of our new mail system is it’s ability to filter mail on the server, without your email client software involved. Server side message filtering can be setup using the webmail interface.

Before setting up a new filter, we recommend setting up your email client to use IMAP (as opposed to POP). Filters will still work with POP accounts, but anything that is filtered out of the INBOX will not be downloaded to your computer. Tips on converting from POP to IMAP can be seen here

You can create new mail folders from within webmail, or from your own IMAP client software. Once you have the mail folders you need to filter incoming mail, then:

• Login into webmail
• Click the Filters link at the top of the page.
• Click the “Add a New Rule” button.

This is where you define how a message is to be identified. It can work with any header, such as the email address of the sender, or a string of text in the Subject. Then, you click the “Move message into” button and tell the server where you want these messages filed.

There is also an easy way to create a new mail filter right from an email message. If you open an email from within webmail, you will see in the top a link to “Create Filter”

Clicking “from” (for example) will create a new mail filter to act on all incoming messages from this same sender. Then you can specify which mail folder you want the messages filed into.

IMAP offers several advantages (and some disadvantages) to POP when it comes to getting your email off of our server. Please refer to another posting for more on this.

If you decide to make the switch in your local email client software, here are steps you need to take

In your email client software, open the account settings and create a new IMAP account. You can’t simply change a POP account into IMAP, you need to create a new account.
After the IMAP account has been created, you will need to either delete the old POP account, or just prevent it from checking for new email. If you decide to delete the account, be aware that in many email clients, removing an account will also delete all the mail associated with that account. Be sure to either move the old Inbox and Sent Mail folder to a local folder on your hard disk, or copy it to the new Inbox and Sent Mail folders on the IMAP server.

If you want to keep the old POP account setup in your email client software, be sure to prevent it from checking for new mail. Here’s how to do this with various popular email clients:

Thunderbird

• Select Account Settings from the Tools menu.
• You should see your account listed on the left. Click  Server Settings under your account, and UN-check both “Check for new messages at startup” and “Check for new messages ever __ minutes”

Outlook Express (or Windows Mail under Vista)

• Select Accounts from the Tools menu.
• Double-click on you account to access the settings for that account.
• In the “General” tab, Uncheck the box that says “Include this account when receiving mail…”
• Click the Apply button, then OK.

Apple Mail

• Select Preferences under the Mail menu
• Click the Accounts icon along the top if it is not already selected.
• Click your account in the list on the left, it it is not already selected
• Click the Advanced tab
• Uncheck the box that says “Include when automatically checking for new mail”
• Close the Preferences window and save changes when prompted.

“Mail” is the standard email client application that comes with OS X. The following instructions were written for Mail version 3.4, but are applicable to any version of Mail since OS X 10.4 came out.

Open the Mail application. If you have never opened it before, it will automatically open the New Account assistant. Otherwise, select “New Account” from the File menu.

Fill in your name, email address and password, then click Continue…

Our server supports both POP and IMAP connections. If you are unsure what to choose, read this.

For the sake of this example, we’ll select IMAP. If you choose POP, the process is the same.

The description can be anything you wish. The Incoming Mail Server is mail.lmi.net for both POP and IMAP connections.

Fill in your server User Name and Password, then click Continue..

We recommend using SSL security, so your password is encrpted before sending over the net. Use Password authentication. Click Continue..

Our outgoing server is the same as the incoming (mail.lmi.net). Authentication is not required if you are connecting to the LMi network, but if you will ever being using your computer outside our network, we recommend just turning Authentication on. Use the same User Name and Password as Incoming mail. Click Continue…

Again, we recommend using SSL security for outgoing email, since your email password is being sent.

Click Continue and you will see a summary of everything you have done. One more click and you’re done!

It may happen that you suddenly receive a lot of “undeliverable” notices for emails that you never sent.

What you’re seeing are bounce messages from forged headers sent in spam or viruses, called “backscatter”.

Note that it does *not* mean someone has “hijacked” your email; merely that someone is lying about the reply-to address for emails they’re sending out.

Backscatter is most commonly seen as an effect of a particular type of virus that effects Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. The way it works is this: A computer becomes infected when the user opens an email that contains this virus. This computer will then mail out copies of the virus to a list of email addresses generated from the address book of the infected computer. It then selects another email address from the inbox of that same computer and uses it as the return address. So the email appears to be coming from someone else. Many email systems are now protected against this virus, so some of the emails that the infected computer is sending out are rejected by the recipients server, and bounces back to the sender, which in this case appears to be you!

So by getting these messages, it does not mean that your computer is infected, just that you have probably sent email to someone else who’s computer WAS infected.

Unfortunately, there isn’t anything you can do to prevent the emails from coming to you, short of changing your email address. We recommend just setting up a filter (aka Mail Rule) in your email client software to automatically delete any messages coming from “Mailer-Daemon” or “Mail Delivery Subsystem”

Please see also http://spamlinks.net/prevent-secure-backscatter.htm