Accessing Google mail via Thunderbird

Reviewed by Brian White 4/11/2012

To access Google mail with Thunderbird, you will need to activate IMAP in Gmail and configure Thunderbird to use Google as an incoming mail server.  You will also need to configure and outgoing mail server, which might as well be Google as well.  These steps are covered below.

Activate IMAP

If you use an imap client such as Thunderbird to read email, you will need to activate the imap setting in Gmail. Go to http://www.gmail.com, log in, and click the gear or flower icon on the upper right corner of the Gmail window, and select "Mail settings".  Under "Settings", click "Forwarding and POP/IMAP".  Then, in the box labelled "IMAP Access", check the button beside "Enable IMAP".  If you don't use POP, make sure that option is not enabled.  Finally, click the "Save Changes" button at the bottom of the window; if you don't, your changes will not be saved.

Configure Thunderbird to use Google as an incoming mail server

Configure your IMAP client with these settings:

Server Type:  IMAP Mail Server
Login:  yourlogin@cs.unc.edu  (Be sure to include "@cs.unc.edu", or it won't work.)
Server Name:  imap.googlemail.com
Port:  993
Connection security:  SSL/TLS  (Note:  If you use an old version of Thunderbird, just specify SSL.)
Authentication method:  Normal password

Configure Thunderbird to use Google as your outgoing mail server

Here are the settings to use if you want to use Google as your outgoing email server:

Server: smtp.googlemail.com
Port: 465
Connection security:  SSL/TLS  (Note:  If you use an old version of Thunderbird, just specify SSL.)
Authentication method:  Normal password
User Name:  yourlogin@cs.unc.edu  (Be sure to include "@cs.unc.edu", or it won't work.)