Thunderbird mail setup

DavMail supports both IMAP and POP protocols. Most users choose IMAP to have full mailbox access, as POP is limited to inbox folder only.

POP protocol is designed to retrieve messages from server and let the client manage storage/folder organization locally. All POP delete orders will move messages to server trash folder. In order to avoid quota issues on server, DavMail can automatically purge oldest messages from trash and sent folders.

DavMail can be used with any IMAP/SMTP client by adjusting the following description designed for Thunderbird. DavMail IMAP support is tested with Thunderbird, Outlook and Apple Mail.

Create a new account

For a new Thunderbird instance, new account wizard opens on first launch. If you already have existing accounts open Tools/Account settings then Account Actions/Add Mail Account...

Enter name, email address and password and click configure manually:

Incoming server type is IMAP, server hostname is localhost, default port is 1143, no SSL and normal password authentication. Outgoing server is localhost, default port is 1025, no SSL and normal password authentication. Set your username (windows account name or email address) and click Re-test to validate account settings, then Done:

By default local communication between Thunderbird and DavMail is not encrypted, and you get the following warning, check I understand the risks and confirm account creation:

Proceed with authentication is you have interactive mode enabled. Initial mail configuration is then complete.

Proceed to Thunderbird calendar setup

Optional additional step

Thunderbird mail message tags

In Thunderbird email messages can be organized with message tags. Outlook provides similar functionality with categories. DavMail's IMAP gateway can transparently translate tags to categories (and vice versa). For custom defined tags it may be necessary to tell DavMail how to convert tags to categories.

Thunderbird stores tags on the server using IMAP keywords. But internally Thunderbird uses a mapping between the user visible tag names and the actually used keywords. For instance, the To Do tag is represented by the $label4 keyword. Assuming you want the Outlook categories to have the same names as the Thunderbird tags, DavMail must know which keywords Thunderbird uses for each tag.

The keywords used by Thunderbird can be found through Preferences -> Advanced -%gt; Config Editor, and searching for mailnews.tags.*.tag, which will show them as mailnews.tags.keyword.tag settings with their corresponding tag user visible value.

Some default tags are defined in Thunderbird, for which DavMail uses a default mapping to categories:

$label1=Important
$label2=Work
$label3=Personal
$label4=To Do
$label5=Later
                

These mappings can be overridden and extended by manually adding properties to the DavMail settings file (.davmail.properties) as davmail.imapFlags.keyword=category, like this:

davmail.imapFlags.$label2=Hobby
davmail.imapFlags.some_test_tag=Some test Category