Thunderbird is a free email client, available for both Mac OS X and Windows, which can be downloaded from mozilla.com.

Once you have downloaded and installed Thunderbird, the first time you open it the Account Wizard will start. Follow the wizard in the steps below but you should know in advance that the Wizard steps are not sufficient to create a working Hunter email account. There are more steps to be performed at the end of the Wizard before you can send and receive mail from Hunter correctly.

Click Email account and then click the Next button.

In the next dialog box enter the following values:

• Select the type of incoming server you are using: IMAP
• Incoming server: ms1.hunter.cuny.edu
• Outgoing server: smtp1.hunter.cuny.edu

Then press the Next button

On the User Names screen enter your NetID for both Incoming User Name and Outgoing User Name. Then press the Next button.

On the Account Name screen enter Hunter for Account Name

The next screen will be headed Congratulations and contain a summary of the settings so far. This completes the Account Wizard, which has captured basic information about your email account. Press the Finish button to exit the Wizard and go onto the next part of this tutorial which fine-tunes the connection to work correctly with Hunter email. Remember the account as configured will not work with Hunter mail until you finish the next steps.

When you finish the Wizard setup, Thunderbird will attempt to connect to the Hunter mail server to fetch your mail. However it is not yet properly configured. At the Mail Server Password dialog click the Cancel button.

Go back to the main Thunderbird program window and choose Tools, then Account Settings.

Find the Hunter entry in Account Settings, then click on Server Settings.

In the Server Settings section make the following changes:

• Port: 993
• Security Settings: SSL
• Use secure authentication: unchecked

Then click the Apply button

Now find the Outgoing Server (SMTP) section and click on it. Select the line that refers to the hunter server (smtp1.hunter.cuny.edu) and click the Edit button.

In the following dialog, make the changes as listed below:

• Port: 587
• Use secure connection: TLS
  

then click OK.

Return to the previous dialog and click OK or Close until you arrive back at the main Thunderbird program window.

Thunderbird will now fetch and send Hunter email. The first time you retrieve mail from Hunter you will be asked to supply a password. Enter your NetID password. The same will happen when you first send email - again enter your NetID password. In each case you may choose to let Thunderbird's Password Manager store these passwords so they will not be required in future sessions. If you own or control the computer in question, you may wish to do so. If you do not have exclusive use of the computer then it is unwise to store your passwords on it.