Updated on Jun 24, 2025
In this tutorial we are going to show you how to add an email account to Mozilla Thunderbird using the POP3 protocol for incoming emails. The POP3 protocol is a good choice if you want to limit the number of devices that have access to the emails. The protocol downloads all messages to the device, after which it deletes them from the mailing server. That way no other devices can see them. You can read more about POP3 here.
In this tutorial we will be using the latest version of Thunderbird, so go ahead and download it if you have not already.
Upon opening Thunderbird for the first time you will be prompted to add an account. However, we will skip that step for just a moment and show you how to add an account from the interface itself. Click the three horizontal lines in the top-right, then select New Account > Email.
That will bring up the initial account setup screen. On it you will need to fill in three fields:
Typically, you can click Continue if you are adding an email account from a dedicated email provider (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.). That will fetch all the incoming and outgoing mail server settings necessary for the process to complete. However, since we will be adding a custom email address ([email protected] for example) that does not use any of those providers, we have to take a slightly different route.
The next step is to manually configure the incoming email server with the POP3 protocol. To do so, click Configure manually under the password field. That will expand the page with a few more fields.
First is the Incoming Server where you will see these fields:
The hostname for the incoming mail server for our services can be mail.yourdomain.com (where the yourdomain.com is your actual domain name). However, we always recommend using the name of the server your account is on. You can easily find it by logging into your account on FastComet.com. From the homepage, click on View Details next to the hosting plan that has the email account. You can find the server name in the FTP Server box. You will also find this information in the welcome email you got when you purchased the hosting plan.
With this the inbound server information is done. Now all that is left is to do the same for the outbound server.
Further down on the same page you will find the SMTP settings. These are for the outgoing email server. You must ensure you fill in the POP3 and SMTP information correctly in order to send and receive emails without any errors. You can read more about SMTP here.
As you can see, the fields are almost identical to those of the previous section. Here is what you will need:
Once you are done you can click on Re-test. Thunderbird will then check the settings you have provided and see if it can establish a connection to the server. If everything was filled in properly you should see a green success message. At that point, simply click Done. That will trigger a short connection process, after which you will see that your account was successfully added.
Congratulations! You have successfully added your email account via POP3 to Thunderbird.