Email Setup

Recently I and several others have had a great deal of trouble using Gmail, Outlook and some other clients to send and receive email from our WA Atmail accounts. I went round and round with support about this. Their best recommendation was not to use an external client at all, or, if I HAD to use an external client, to use Thunderbird by Mozilla.

I have tried to answer some questions for people about how best to setup Thunderbird and decided I should just post some instructions here. My personal email is through Gmail, so I will use their server names. If you use another provider, you will need their server names.

After installing Thunderbird, go to Tools->Account settings

A new window will open like the one below

Click on Account Actions and in the drop down box click on Add Mail Account. Another new window will open

Fill out the fields using your Atmail address and your Atmail password, then click continue.

Thunderbird will automatically find and setup the account and show you the results as below

Click on Done.

Expand the account in the left pane. In the right pane check to be sure you are working on the correct account then check your name and email address. If you wish, enter an address in the Reply-to field. Note that you cannot send email FROM your Atmail account, This is why you might want to enter a Reply-to address. In the "Outgoing Server (SMTP) field choose or enter the outgoing server name of your non-Atmail email provider, in my case this is Google as my personal email is with Gmail. This is the server for the account that will actually send the email. If the recipient hits reply, the return mail will come to this account unless the recipient specifically uses the Reply-to address.

To be perfectly clear, you need to either setup another, existing email account or add the outgoing server of a legitimate, existing account in order to send mail. To add the outgoing server of an existing account without setting up the whole account in Thunderbird, click on Outgoing Server (SMTP) in the left pane

Finally, click on "Server Settings" for the appropriate account. Make sure the Server type is IMAP, the server name should be mail.yourdomain.com, the port should be 143 and the user name should be your full Atmail email address.

You can now send and receive mail for your Atmail account.

I hope this helps. If you still have questions, send me a message.