Thunderbird and Proxy Server Settings
When attempting to check email after installing
Mozilla Thunderbird on a Windows 10 system and configuring an email account
in Thunderbird, instead of email being downloaded, Thunderbird would show
"Connecting to pop3.example.com" and seemed to be indefinitely stuck at that
point. When I opened
Wireshark to observe the network traffic between the
Windows 10 laptop and the email server, I didn't see any traffic whether
Thunderbird was configured to use the
Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) port 110 or the secure
version of the protocol POP3S on
port 995. I set the Wireshark filter to be
tcp.port eq 110 || tcp.port
eq 995. I didn't see any traffic between to/from the server when I
changed the filter to look for traffic to/from the
IP address
of the server with
ip.addr == xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was the IP address of the server. After puzzling over the matter
for awhile, it finally dawned on me that I had prevoiusly configured the
Microsoft Edge browser to use a
SOCKS proxy server
via a
Secure Shell (SSH) tunnel set up with
PuTTY. I had disconnected the PuTTY connection to the
SSH
server, but hadn't changed the
proxy
server settings for the system so I realized the was likely the cause of
the problem, though I hadn't expected Thunderbird to use the system proxy
server setting by default.
[More Info]
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Adding another SMTP Server to Thunderbird
To add another SMTP server for outgoing email in Thunderbird 24.6.0 on a
Microsoft Windows systems, take the following steps:
-
Hit Alt-T to bring up the Tools menu.
-
Select Account Settings.
-
An Account Settings window will open showing you all of the
email accounts you have set up. Scroll down to the bottom of the list of
accounts where you will see Outgoing Server (SMTP), which you
should select by clicking on it.
-
You will then see an Add button that you can click on to add
an additional SMTP server for outgoing email.
-
Complete the fields for the SMTP server, including "Description", "Server
Name" and "Port", which will likely be 25 or 587. If you need to authenticate
with the server when sending email, select the appropriate authentication
method and provide a user name, if needed.
-
Click on the OK button.
-
If you wish any of the email accounts you have set up in Thunderbird to use
that SMTP server, select an account you wish to have use that outgoing email
server by right-clicking on it, e.g. jdoe@example.com, and picking
Settings. For the "Outoging Server (SMTP)" value, which you will see
with the email address selected, i.e., don't click on "Server Settings" or
any other option below the address, select the new server and click on
OK.
References:
-
Multiple SMTP servers - Thunderbird
mozilaZine
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Using an Email Alias in Thunderbird
When I register an email address for a website, I normally create a new
email alias unique to that website or the company associated with the
website. Unfortuately, many companies and websites sell their email lists
to other companies, ususally labelled as their "partners" in their privacy
policies, seeing that as a way to make additional revenue from their
customers or website visitors. Even if a company states they won't do so, most
reserve the right to change their privacy policy at any time and there is also
the possibility that the company will go out of business at some point and
all assets, including its mailing lists, will be sold to others.
I receive an inordinate amount of spam every day and waste a lot of time
purging it from my inbox, so by creating an email alias, which I can
easily do, since I manage the email server that processes my email, I can
simply invalidate any alias when I notice I'm receiving a lot of spam with
a particular alias I created in the "to" field. E.g., if I created an
alias Acme_2014@example.com that points to Me@example.com and start receiving
spam to Acme_2014@example.com, I know that the Acme Corporation sold my
email address to a spammer or had a compromise of their server holding my
account information.
Since Acme_2014 is not an email address that a spammer who employs name
dictionaries to distribute spam might use, I can be sure that
the source of the email is using the email address I gave to the Acme
Corporation. If I used an address such as abe, bill, or zachary@example.com,
I couldn't be certain, since some spammers try sending email to a
domain using every name from a name dictionary. I also wouldn't use
acme@example.com, since that is a word in an English language dictionary,
so spammers using a dictionary for building email addresses might use it.
I can easily create aliases on my email server, but there are a number
of online services that will allow you to create such aliases to thwart
spammers. E.g., with such a service you might be able to create an
alias acme_2014@spamblock1.com that points to me@example.com, if
me@example.com is the email address you normally use.
If you wanted to communicate with Acme Corporation by email, you
might need to use the alias you used in the "from" field of email you
send to them. To do so in Thunderbird 24.2.0, right-click on your
account, which should be located at the top of the left pane of the
Thunderbird window. E.g., you may see me@example.com there. Select
Settings, then put the alias in the Email Address field
and, if needed, set the Your Name field appropriately, then
click on OK. Once you have sent the email you needed to send
to the Acme Corporation you can change the settings back to those you
normally use.
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Missing IMAP Folders in Thunderbird
Thunderbird was
not showing some folders listed for an email account on
an an
IMAP server.
In order to get them to display on the PC on which I was running
Thunderbird 17.0.4, within Thunderbird I clicked on
File, then
selected
Subscribe. I then saw a folder list with "Select the
folders to subscribe to" displayed above the folders on the IMAMP server
for the account. I checked the boxes to the right of the ones that weren't
displaying. For some folders that had subfolders, I had to click on the
rightward pointing arrowhead to the left of the folder to display the
subfolders and their checkboxes.
[/network/email/clients/thunderbird]
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