This lesson will focus on the email program, Thunderbird. Thunderbird is part of the Mozilla suite, but may be run as a stand-alone program without installing Firefox, the Mozilla browser. It's a free program that has a lot of support in the open-source community so it's one that will continue to be improved upon quickly, both in terms of security as well as enhancements.
How to install Thunderbird
Go to:
http://www.mozilla.org/download.html
The page lists Mozilla downloads. For Thunderbird there are options for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. Click on the one for your operating system and then select Save in the file download dialog box. When the download is complete, run the installer. Thunderbird will attempt to import mail and account settings from other email programs when you install it, so if you are planning on moving from Eudora or Outlook to Thunderbird it will import everything to your new Thunderbird account. Later if you find that Thunderbird didn't import everything you needed or if it imported from the wrong email program (e.g., from Outlook instead of Eudora), you can alway manually import within Thunderbird itself. Go to Tools --> Import and choose the material (mail, address books, or settings) you want to import and from where. Do this three times, each time choosing to import a different category until all three (mail, address books, settings) have been imported.
The next lesson (Monday, March 21) will focus specifically on situations where you have more than one user or more than one account set up in Eudora on a single computer, for example when you are retrieving email for both a county email account and your own.
To configure Thunderbird to work with the new SSL requirements for UC Davis (Note: This applies only to UC Davis email accounts), go to Tools --> Account Settings. In the window to the left, highlight Server Settings. Check the box that says "Use Secure Connection (SSL)." This will change the port from 110 to 995. Click Ok.
Filters
One thing that Thunderbird will not import from another email program is the filters. If you've created filters in your old email program you will need to recreate them in Thunderbird. Follow this link to view instructions, with screen shots, for setting up filters in Thunderbird.
http://www.nidelven-it.no/articles/introduction_to_thunderbird_7
Managing directories
Thunderbird shows its mailboxes and folders on a window to the left, similar to the way Eudora shows them. If you install and run Thunderbird without importing from another email program, there will be one set of folders to the left that includes mailboxes for the inbox, sent, junk, etc. If you import from another program, you will notice another set of folders below the first. This new set will its own inbox, trash, etc., and will contain your email from the program you have imported from. Those are the mailboxes you will go to when you need to look at old mail from Eudora. All of the new mail you'll receive and send since installing Thunderbird will appear in the first set of directories and not in the ones you have imported.
Junk mail in Thunderbird
Thunderbird uses something called "Bayesian filtering," which means that you need to teach the mail client what is spam and what isn't. You can either highlight a mail message and press the Junk button or you can right click on an email and mark it as "Junk" or "Not junk." By checking and unchecking mail, you're teaching Thunderbird which emails are spam. After a few weeks the client should be able to remove 99%+ of the spam that comes into your inbox. It is very important to train the spam filter in this way in the early weeks of using the program. It is also necessary to visit the Junk folder and check to make sure no legitimate messages were mistakenly sent there. If there is a message in the junk folder that isn't junk, you need to highlight the message and click the "Not junk" button.
To get to your junk mail settings, go to Tools --> Junk Mail Controls. Under the Settings tab, my advice is to make sure all of the boxes are checked.
UCD Campus Spam Filtering
UCD has a program called Spam Assassin that tests all of the email going to ucdavis.edu email addresses to identify and tag suspected spam, but it doesn't do anything with the suspected spam until you tell it what to do. You have three choices: (1) do nothing and you'll just keep getting the spam; (2) have it deleted at the campus mail server and you won't get it at all; or (3) have it stopped at the campus server and stored. In this case you will receive an email once a week that summarizes all of the spam in case there is something legitimate that you want to retrieve.
You can make your choice by going to:
http://security.ucdavis.edu/spam.cfm
Toward the top of the page in the middle under Campus Spam Filtering, click on "Set up campus spam filtering now."
You'll have to put in your username and password. Scroll down to the bottom of the page that opens up.
The default choice is the first one listed on the webpage. All the spam will be sent to your email account and you will have to rely on your email program's spam filters to catch it.
The second option is to receive an email once a week summarizing your spam. Then you can glance through the list and retrieve the items that you want. If you choose this second option one thing you have to remember to do is go into Geckomail periodically and delete the messages in the UCD-spam folder. If you don't, your email account will fill up and people won't be able to send you anything anymore.
The third choice listed is to have the spam deleted and never even delivered to your email account. You also have to check the box that says you understand that you may lose desirable mail. Once it has been deleted, you can't get it back.
Even if you activate the campus spam filters, you will still receive some spam -- it won't catch everything. In fact, the campus spam filters are very conservative because they don't want to stop legitimate email. So if you activate the campus spam filters, make sure that you also make use of the spam filters that come with your email program.
To access geckomail go to:
Resources available:
There are many resources available on the web to help you learn to use Thunderbird or help solve any problems that may come up. An excellent tutorial with screen shots is at
http://www.nidelven-it.no/articles/introduction_to_thunderbird
I would recommend this for any beginning Thunderbird user. Another important resource is at
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird
This includes an FAQ and a good Knowledge Base as well as links to tips and advice. Feel free to call Damon, Claudia, or Blaine with any questions or difficulties and we'll do our best to help.
Coming up in Monday's lesson: Importing multiple user accounts into Thunderbird.