Configure the e-mail client (Example: Thunderbird)

An e-mail account at servus consists of a username (m_name) and password. Your e-mail address is yourname@servus.at (or @your_domain_name). There is an incoming mail server and an outgoing mail server, which you need to configure for your e-mail client (e-mail program) to work.

Thunderbird Installation

Under Linux you can install it using the package manager or the software manager of your distribution. Use the following commands for specific distributions:

Debian, Ubuntu & co:

apt install thunderbird

RHEL, Centos, Fedora, … :

yum install thunderbird

or

dnf install thunderbird

Windows and OSX: You can install Thunderbird manually by downloading it from https://www.thunderbird.net/ or via package managers such as winget or homebrew.

Terminology: IMAP, POP3, SMTP

When configuring your e-mail program, terms appear that are important to understand, because they affect how you retrieve e-mail from our server. The SMTP protocol (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is used to feed and exchange e-mails. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and POP3 (Post Office Protocol Version 3) are available as protocols for retrieving e-mail from our mail server.

By choosing one of the two receiving protocols, you define the way you work with your e-mail correspondence. Whether you use IMAP or POP3 to fetch your mails depends mainly on your e-mail usage.

IMAP works in a way that users can leave their emails, folder structures and settings on the mail servers. The clients access the information on the servers directly online. An IMAP user keeps his/her mails on the servers and, even across multiple and different clients, always has uniform access. This is usually what you would want since you can access your emails from different machines and clients without worrying about local backups.

With POP3, on the other hand, after logging on to the mail server, all e-mails are downloaded from the mail server to the client. If you have configured it this way, they will be deleted from the mail server and will only be available on your client. So you cannot access your mails from a second device.

In short: If you would like to access your email from different devices, you can use IMAP. If you only use one device to read and send e-mail, you can use POP3, but you have to take care of backing up & locally storing your emails.

If you are unsure: You should use IMAP.

Thunderbird Configuration

The first time you start Thunderbird you will be asked for your e-mail address. Then the program automatically tries to find the appropriate settings for your e-mail account.

When adding a new account:

• First fill out your name, email address and password sections.
• Click Configure manually… at the bottom.
• Fill out the settings for INCOMING and OUTGOING with the information below:

INCOMING
Protocol: IMAP
Server: mail.servus.at
Port: 143
SSL: STARTTLS
Authentication: Autodetect
Username: m_username

OUTGOING
Protocol: SMTP
Server: mail.servus.at
Port: 587
SSL: STARTTLS
Authentication: Autodetect
Username: m_username