154. Get Your Email  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 153 Create an Email Account
 SEE ALSO 156 Send a Message
After setting up an email account, as explained in 153 Create an Email Account , you're ready to begin using Thunderbird to manage your email. The first thing you'll probably want to do is to check and see if you have any new messages. After you receive an email message, you can read through it, reply to it, forward it to someone else, and add the person who sent you the message to your address book. You can import mail from your old email program if you like, or you can start fresh in Thunderbird and import only new messages as described in this task. To import mail from another program, choose Tools, Import from the menu. In the Import dialog box, select Mail and click Next . Select your old email program from the next screen and click Next again. You'll see a message telling you how many messages were imported into Thunderbird; click Finish . | 1. | Click Get Mail By default, Thunderbird checks for new messages every 10 minutes and notifies you if there are any new ones. In most cases, Thunderbird also retrieves those messages for you. However, to retrieve new email messages now instead of waiting for 10 minutes, click the Get Mail button on the Mail toolbar. 154. Get Your Email   NOTES To change how often email is checked, choose Tools, Account Settings , and display the Server Settings page for an account. Then change the value in the Check for new messages every XX minutes box. To automatically retrieve new mail, enable the Automatically download new messages option as well. If you have multiple email accounts set up, all email is typically retrieved when you click Get Mail . However, if you've set up email accounts that are not linked to the main account, click the arrow on the Get Mail button and select the account whose mail you want to retrieve. You can link an email account to the main account by clicking the Advanced button on the account's Server Settings page in the Account Settings dialog box and enabling the Include this server when getting new mail option. | | 2. | Enter Password The first time you get mail from an account during a session, you'll be prompted for your password. This is the password your email service provider gave you so that you could access your email. Type your password in the text box and click OK . New messages are retrieved, and a notification appears on the status bar. The number of messages in the current folder, along with the number that have not yet been read, also appears on the status bar. TIPS If you don't want to have to type in your password each time you retrieve email, enable the Use Password Manager to remember the password option. The email notification appears even if you're working in some other program and not Thunderbird, so you'll always know when you get a new message. Click the link within the notification to change over to Thunderbird to view (and download, if needed) your messages. | | 3. | View Message
Typically, incoming messages are placed in the Inbox folder, although you can create subfolders for special messages and have messages directed to those folders. (See 161 Organize Incoming Mail .) So, if needed, click the folder that contains the message you want to read. Messages in that folder appear in a list on the right side of the Thunderbird window.
Unread messages appear in bold; the number of unread messages in the current folder appears in the status bar. To view a message, click its header. The message content appears in a viewing pane below the message header listing. You can change the location and size of this viewing pane by selecting the view you want to use from the View, Layout menu.
Some messages contain images that are not displayed; if you want to view such images, click the Show Images button that appears just above the view pane.
Some messages have files attached to them. These messages are identified with a small paper clip icon in front of their subject line in the message header listing. When you view a message with file(s) attached, the attachments are listed below the message text in the view pane. See 158 Attach a File to a Message for help in viewing and saving such attachments.
| | 4. | Label Message if Desired
If you want, you can label a message as important, work related , personal, and so on. Each label type is a different color, and when you assign a label to a message, the message's header appears in that color , making the message easy to identify.
With the message still selected, choose Message, Label , and then select the label type from the submenu that appears. For example, if you label a message as important, then its header appears in red. Sort messages by their label by choosing View, Sort By, Label from the menu.
To display only messages of a particular label, open the View list box just above the message headers and select that label type such as Personal . You can also use the View list to limit the display of messages in other waysfor example, you can display messages only from "people you know" (people listed in the address book). See 155 Find a Message .
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