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General discussion

Use Thunderbird with 'only' a web based account.

by MarkFlax Forum moderator Aug 23, 2011 10:16PM PDT

Question please.

A friend of mine has UK internet access via Sky, so Sky is her ISP.

She has never set up or used Sky's own email service and doesn't have an email account with them. She does have a Yahoo.co.uk email account, web based.

Can she set this up on Thunderbird even though TB does not have an ISP email server to connect to? She has the instructions to do it and I went through them with her. In fact we set her Yahoo account up on my own TB software using the POP & SMTP settings without problems, but I have an ISP email account anyway. I deleted that Yahoonaccount after proving it works.

I told her to try it when she gets home, but I got confused about this. Does TB, (or any email client, Outlook, WLM etc), need to connect to an ISP email server to be able to pull down these 3rd party emails? Or will TB simply connect to the Yahoo's internet based servers to download the emails?

Assuming she can download them, will she be able to 'send' emails?

Sorry but I started going round in circles.

Mark

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
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Solved!!
by MarkFlax Forum moderator Aug 24, 2011 5:36AM PDT

My friend emailed me from her newly created TB email account, set up with Yahoo.co.uk web based email, and with no ISP email account

No problems, it went through like a dream. So that's answered my own question.

I learn something new everyday here.

Mark

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You didn't even learn it here.
by Kees_B Forum moderator Aug 24, 2011 7:24AM PDT

You learned it from your friend. If I had seen your question before it was resolved, I could have told you, but that's not necessary any more.

The reason: different pop3 e-mail accounts with different mail providers are totally independent. However, the usual setup for e-mail servers offered by an ISP is that they are configured to only allow sending by their own Internet clients, as a spam protection.
Obviously, that would be a very bad setting for an e-mail service provider that doesn't offer an ISP-service, because nobody would be able to use them.

Kees

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Yes you're right of course.
by MarkFlax Forum moderator Aug 24, 2011 8:27PM PDT

I was thinking back to the early days of Dial-up, when there were no such things as web-based mail, and where if you connected to one ISP by dial-up they would not allow any other ISP emails to be accessed. You had to keep disconnecting from one and re-connecting to the other.

How times have changed! Happy

Mark

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