Configuring Thunderbird

Setting up the Mozilla Thunderbird Email Client

Older instructions

Prior to 2024-6-19 (??date may need changing), instructions for setting up Thunderbird were in an HTML web page https://www.ncf.ca/ncf/support/mail_thunderbird3.html. This page dealt with a single email provider and none of the additional features of Thunderbird. It is also possible that the recommended settings may be sub-optimal or not work.

What you will need to know

While some of the following information may be gathered by Thunderbird itself as we set it up for a particular NCF member, it is useful to have it saved somewhere safe for reference and security. The list of information has been mentioned already in the Email (currently draft??) page. You may also want to know the URL (i.e., address) of your Calendar. If you are going to use your NCF Zimbra Calendar, then you will want the ICS URL that you can find using the following steps:

• Log into your NCF account with a web browser.
• Choose Email (i.e., Zimbra)
• Select Calendar
• Click the small downward pointing triangle next to the Calendar. This will open up a menu box.
• Choose Share Calendar from the menu. This will open a dialog for sharing your calendar

 with other users, but we just want the ICS URL at the bottom.

The ICS URL for NCF member zz999 will be

  https://mail.ncf.ca/home/zz999@ncf.ca/Calendar.ics

You can generally copy the text of the URL by Right-Click on it, so it is easy to paste into the Calendar settings of Thunderbird or into a file where this information will be saved.

Downloading and Installing Thunderbird

Installers for Thunderbird can be found and downloaded from https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/

Notes:

• Windows users have a choice of 64 bit exe, 64 bit msi and 32 bit exe files.
• Windows may object to running the installer. If so, you will need to

set the "Choose where to get apps" in the "Apps and Features" section of the Control panel (i.e., settings) for your installation of Windows. A workable choice is "Anywhere, but warn me ...". Microsoft tries hard to get you to use their software, and sometimes to pay for it too.

• Linux users may find Thunderbird is already installed with their distribution.

Most common Linux distros include Thunderbird automatically. If not, they almost always have a way to install it via the distribution's package installer e.g., the apt tool for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint families, or yum for Red Hat/SUSE and related distros. Using the download page is generally a poor alternative, since the installers arrange for automatic updates which improve security and fix bugs.