How To Manually Setup an Email Account in Thunderbird 3.1
Posted on February 1, 2011
WOW, There seems to have been a huge misstep when Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.1 How do you manually setup an email account.
From the help section of Thunderbird, it clearly states you click the stop button in the automatic account process and then click the “Manual Setup” button clearly located at the lower left corner of the wizard. And that’s where the misstep is, THERE IS NO “Manual Setup” button.
The reason there is no “Manual Setup” button is that the Remember Password option was checked. In the very clear and labeled pictures in the solution at Mozilla, it shows the password and the Remember Password check box clearly checked. However this will not work on Thunderbird 3.1. All you have to do is leave out your password during the wizard setup and the Manual Setup will magically appear. Then you can add you password when you set up the email account manually.
The code to make the Manual Setup button appear when the Remember Password option was checked would be trivial to implement.
This took about an hour for me to figure out, so I hope this saved you some time. I have been a big fan on Thunderbird for many years. For the price you really can not beat the functionality of Thunderbird.
Thanks for this post. However, it didn’t work for me (at least not by leaving out the password).
It seems the people who devised this “wizard” are so sure of their methodology that any server they find will default to IMAP (even if it doesn’t support IMAP). Following your good idea out a little further, I entered an e-mail address with the server domain ‘not11111111.org’. Apparently, if the “wizard” is unable to find a server, it won’t assume IMAP, and you can go back and fix invalid references after selecting Manual Setup.
I too am a big supporter of Mozilla. Unfortunately, there seem to be some folks there who want to impose their “bright ideas” on everyone that uses these critical open-source applications. I mean: how tough would it be to simply branch to the Manual Setup on “Cancel”, rather than (in effect) saying: “If you don’t want to use our Autoconfig wizard, you can’t create a new account…” (?)
Thanks very much for your good idea, which has solved the problem for me (albeit, using one of the ugliest work-arounds I’ve ever seen).