Reply #2: Thunderbird is just an email program that lets you... [View All]

[Kutjara]

...connect to your email account(s) and download the emails to your own machine. It doesn't have any email accounts built in, so you need to sign up for an email service (like Gmail) and then set Thunderbird up to receive mail from it. You can also compose emails in Thunderbird and send them through Gmail (or whatever email service you choose).

The advantage of Thunderbird over a web-based service like Gmail is that you download the emails to your own machine, so you don't have to be connected to the Net to read old mails; you have a copy of your emails stored on your own machine in case your email service has a server problem and loses your mail; and it's faster than using a web-based mail service because all the reading and composing happens right on your machine, not on the email service's server.

The Gmail site has instructions that tell you how to set up Thunderbird to work with it.