Revision as of 10:46, 14 July 2011

These directions are written to use Outlook 2000. They have been written to allow you to add your freecycle.org mail account to your email program once your mail account has been created/moved to the "mail.freecycle.org" server.

Start up Outlook 2000 and click the "Tools" entry on the menu bar. From the menu that drops down, select "Accounts".

• Pull down the "Tools" menu and click "Accounts".
• In the "Internet Accounts" dialogue box, click the button marked "Add" and then select "Mail". The "Internet Connection Wizard" will now appear.
• In the "Email address" box, type your full Freecycle email address, ending with "@freecycle.org".
• Note: The "Your Name" box allows you to type a 'display name' which will appear on the email messages that you send.
• Note: The "Internet Connection Wizard" may try to get you to "import settings" - press the "Cancel" button if it does so.

Under E-mail Server Names, type the information provided by your ISP, following these steps: Select your mail server type in the "My incoming mail server is a ______ server" list.

The Post Office Protocol (POP3) server is the default option. The POP3 server holds your mail before you download it to your computer. This is the most common type of mail retrieval protocol used with Internet mail. The other option is Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP), which allows you to view mail on the host server, but does not automatically download mail to your computer.

Type your incoming mail server in the "Incoming Mail (POP3 or IMAP) server" box.

This server name may be in the form of a name such as pop3.myispnet.net, or in the form of an Internet Protocol (IP) address such as 222.133.22.3.

Type the outgoing mail server in the "Outgoing mail (SMTP) server" box.

This may be in the form of a name such as smtp.myispnet.net, or in the form of an IP address such as 222.133.22.1. The Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) is used for sending mail with both POP3 and IMAP. Click Next.

Server settings

Follow the prompts and configure as follows:

Security Settings

• Find the new account in the panel on the left (above the Add Account... button.) Below the new account, click Server Settings. You should see the right side of the window change to the Server Settings information.
• Under Security Settings, click the TLS selection.
• There are other settings on this panel which you may wish to set, in particular the Check for new messages every X minutes option.
• Find the new account in the panel on the left (above the "Add Account..." button.) Below the new account, click "Composition & Addressing". You should see the right side of the window change to the "Composition & Addressing" information.
• Under "Composition", PLEASE TURN OFF the "Compose messages in HTML format" option. This will cause all of your outgoing mail to be sent as plain text, which is important because:
  • It saves bandwidth. Sending a message as HTML requires three to five times as much space as sending the same message as plain text. Some people are still using dialup accounts or slow satellite connections, and anything you can do to help them read their email more quickly is appreciated.
  • Everybody can read plain text emails, but not everybody is able to read HTML email. Some people read their email using text-only email programs, or using portable devices (i.e. Treo, BlackBerry, or other "smart phone") which cannot handle HTML email.
  • Some people, myself included, either block HTML email entirely, or configure their email programs to not show HTML emails, for security reasons (i.e. to not allow viruses and spyware to infect my machine.) And to put it very bluntly, I don't have the patience to try and pick somebody's message out from between a bunch of HTML tags.
• Click the OK button.

Outgoing Mail settings

• The last item in the panel on the left is "Outgoing Server (SMTP)". Click this. You should see the right side of the window change to the "Outgoing Server (SMTP) Settings" information.
• If the list on the right has more than one item, click on the item corresponding to the new account.
• Click the Edit... button on the right.
• Click the TLS option at the bottom of the window, and change the Port number to 465.
• Make sure the Use name and password checkbox is turned ON. If not, turn it on.
• The User Name field should already contain your full email address, ending with @freecycle.org. If not, enter it.
• You may wish to fill in the "Description" field at the top of this box, as I did here. It's not really necessary, it just makes the list of SMTP accounts look a little bit more orderly.
• Click the OK button.
• At this point, all of the necessary settings should be correct. You should be able to hit the OK button at the bottom of the window and return to Thunderbird's main screen.

Downloading Mail

• When you get back to the main screen, in the panel on the left side of the window you should see the new account you just created, along with the Local Folders item.
• If you turned on the Check for new messages every X minutes option, Thunderbird will start checking your mailbox every few minutes (whatever you set it to.) If not, you can click the Get Mail button at the top of the screen to make Thunderbird check your incoming mail now.
• The first time you check the mail, you will be asked for the password. You should enter it.
• You will also see the "Use Password Manager to remember this password" checkbox. Thunderbird's password manager is like a repository of stored passwords for different mailboxes. If you choose to use it, you will need to set a "master password" which protects all of the others, and enter that master password every time you run Thunderbird. Otherwise, you'll have to enter the mailbox password every time you run Thunderbird.
• Personally, I have five different mailboxes, so it makes sense for me to enter just the one master password instead of entering the passwords for all five mailboxes individually.

Mailbox Folders

• After Thunderbird has checked the mail in your mailbox for the first time, it will show you any folders which may exist on the server. The webmail interface automatically creates folders called Drafts, Sent, and Trash on the server. You can also create your own folders for storing messages- the one restriction is that they must be created as children of the Inbox folder, rather than siblings of the Inbox folder.
• You can create folders as children of the "Inbox" folder in the new account. Those folders are physically stored on the mail server, which means they will be accessible through any other IMAP client, including the webmail interface. The contents of these folders will also be backed up on a regular basis.
• You can also create folders as children of the Local Folders item. However, those folders are physically stored on your hard drive and will not be accessible from any computer other than the machine where you're running Thunderbird. Freecycle is unable to back up the contents of your local machine, so doing this may result in your stored items not being backed up anywhere, which means that if something happens to your desktop computer, anything in those folders will be gone.

Mail Server backups

Our mailserver is backed up each night, and backups are retained for 30 days. However, be careful with deleting messages and especially folders, because restoring backups is an involved and time-consuming procedure for Freecycle's already-overstretched IT team.