Thunderbird Setup (old server)

IMPORTANT: If your account was created before August 2008 and you have not been told that you have moved to the new mail server, use these instructions. If you are on the new mail server (new accounts or if we have told you that you have moved), click here.

PLEASE NOTE: Many users who have bought new machines (does not apply to computers provided by Physics Computer Services) and have Symantec/Norton Internet Security on their machines are unable to send email. This occurs because Symantec/Norton expects to be able to scan each outgoing email but cannot scan encrypted messages. Our outgoing server uses encryption as a part of our effort to maintain security. You may:

1. Attempt to turn off this scanning by following the instructions from Symantec:
   Article #2003020715374936 - click here
2. Uninstall Norton Internet Security. If you also uninstall the anti-virus client, please immediately install McAfee from FAS here. (You should also uninstall "Live Update" in this case).

Setting Up Thunderbird to Connect to Physics

Mozilla Thunderbird is our de facto e-mail client and the instructions below assume you have a relatively recent version. It is available for free for most platforms (Unix, Linux, Macintosh and Windows) from mozilla.com. The first time you open the Thunderbird, you will get the email account wizard. The first dialog box from this wizard is shown below:

The email account radio button is selected by default, so just click the "Next" button to advance to the next dialog box:

Fill in your real name and email address. The username is the same one you use to log in to Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Click the "Next" button to advance to the next dialog box:

The default protocol is POP, which is wrong, so select the IMAP radio button. Both the incoming and outgoing server names are the same, "physics.harvard.edu". Click "Next" to get:

and fill in your username (the local part of the email address from the second dialog box). Click "next" to get:

You can call the account anything you want. 'Physics' works well for most. The default is the same as your email address, which seems cumbersome to me. However, this is only really significant if you are configuring Mozilla to access multiple accounts. Otherwise, it really doesn't matter much, so just click "Next" to get the summary which should look something like this:

You can now click "Finish", but you are not finished.

The next thing you'll see is this error dialog:

because Thunderbird assumes an insecure IMAP server and is then greatly surprised to discover that ours isn't. So click "OK" to dismiss the error dialog (you really don't have any choice) and select "Account Settings" from the "Tools" menu:

A note regarding next picture:
Mac users: The path under "Local directory" will look different for you. You do not need to change it.
Windows users: The "Local directory" path is an example. Yours will read differently. Leave it as it is.

Click on the checkbox "Use secure connection (SSL)", then click the "Advanced" button:

and set the "IMAP server directory" (or "IMAP Path Prefix" on other versions) to "mail" and click off the "Show only subscribed folders" checkbox. Hit "OK" to return to the server settings dialog and then zip down to "Outgoing Server (SMTP)"

UPDATE: We now recommend using port 587 instead of port 25. The reason is that port 587 is generally not blocked by ISPs such as Comcast, which does often block port 25. Using port 587 will get around this problem and allow you to send mail from, hopefully, most anywhere.

And here select the "TLS" radio button to turn on SMTP/SSL. And that should do it.