Personally I would welcome the exit of ATT from the email market. They have used a contracted service with yahoo for probably the last 10 years and it has at best been a dogs breakfast. Special passwords and odd setting to get yahoo to work with the ATT email.

There are many mail providers out there. Google is not the only one. Personally I have a weakness for GMX, because the parent company is based in Germany and must use German privacy laws, they don't retain much information about you at all. Where as the US folk do their utmost to retain everything about you they can. but that list is far from complete. Try googling free email providers on google, they list close to 30.

Now we get to the real issue. I assume your mail is currently downloaded as POP, as IMAP mail will not survive the closure of the mail account on the server.

You worry about "Merging" stuff.

I can not speak for Eudora, but unless you have already imported that mail to Thunderbird it is about lost. Eudora is not able to run on some of the more recent operating systems so I would suggest you import that mail before you actually loose it. Eudora stores mail in a proprietary format so with no Eudora reading it becomes a real problem.

Next you talk about adding a gmail account to your existing profile like as if data is all going to be merged together. That can be the case if you choose to use POP and a global inbox, but simply selecting not to use a global inbox for the account will have the account added to the folder pane as it's own entry and having it's own inbox and associated folders. Personally I use the global inbox, and Thunderbird reports it as being almost 7 and a half GB in size. That is not the profile, just the inbox. The profile is over 50. I have some 25 accounts, mostly mail accounts registered in Thunderbird and I am starting to see cracks, but data loss is a long way off I think. I do however make a manual backup of the profile every couple of months, so loosing historical stuff is not really an issue and the google and outlook account retain copies of all mail in the past couple of years anyway.

Yes you can add the account to Thunderbird. Yes you can "merge" it is you want. I would suggest against it really.

What you need to be sure of is your use of POP mail as that makes immutable local copies. IMAP does not, even though it's downloading of whole folder structures and their contents is very handy, it is only as good as the server it connects to.

Hey, Matt, I am sorry that I confused the issue by mentioning Eudora. We used Eudora exactly as we now use Thunderbird! All of our messages saved in Eudora were imported to Thunderbird about 12 years ago after Qualcomm stopped supporting Eudora. Our ISP for 15 years has been Windstream and we both had Windstream addresses. I didn't realize that AT&T no longer offered email except through Yahoo.

Now to the good part: You may have solved my problem! I, too, have been concerned about Gmail and privacy. Thank you for mentioning GMX. I have a friend who uses that. If we can set up GMX addresses for both my husband and me and then get those to work in Thunderbird, the problem is solved. My older Gmail account can still be totally separate.

If the GMX addresses are brand new, then there will be no merging problem. Thank you. I still need to reread your message and see if I can understand it, but it looks good so far.

Hey, Matt, I thought your solution was excellent. It still is, but the GMX website itself has a glitch. I saw this yesterday. Hoped it would resolve today, but it has not. The GMX site seems straightforward. However, when I click on Create Email Address, the site constantly jumps back and forth from basic home page to the create email page. It will not stay still long enough for me to click on the email page. I have never seen anything quite like this.

Our local computer guy says he can help me get Thunderbird to work with new addresses, but now I'll have to look for something other then GMX. Thank you so much for everything.

I have never seen anything quite like this.

Neither had I until it happened to me just a minute or so ago trying to repeat your process.

Hold the alt key. Your browser pop up blocker is blocking the popup that accepts the necessary cookies. Holding Alt will override the blocker in most browsers, allow the permission to save cookies dialog to pop up and your issue will be gone.

GMX went back to working fine, but I now know tht the free version of GMX doesn't work with Thunderbird. Itis useless for me. I got Outlook to work last night. GMX seemed like a good idea and was cooler than Outlook. I am not willing to pay though.

I quite carefully downloaded a POP3 mail history before switching Internet Service Providers. However every time I load Thunderbird, it's trying to connect to the defunct ISP.

Can I configure Thunderbird to read the POP3 files without a log in, or do I need to find another way to read the POP3 locally stored email?

Thanks, Dave F.