Having you own domain is actually a fairly technical undertaking. Setting up your own domain is not rocket science, but it is not a simple as buying your groceries of ordering takeout and getting it wrong means customers can get the wrong impression before you ever get to interact with them. (All your mail goes to a spam folder or your web address has a banner about legitimate businesses not asking you to validate something). It is something that really need to hands of a competent professional. There are many many pitfalls and your issues may only just be beginning with email. Consult a professional is my recommendation. Cutting corners to save on startup costs on your website and email generally is not a profitable decision. Most folk do no balance the tyres on their own car, they consult a professional. Some goes for setting up a domain.

I would guess you have a godaddy site that uses Microsoft exchange. So you will be needing an add-on to access your mail using Thunderbird, but my understanding is that this is detected automatically. But if the DNS records for the domain are not complete then the setup will fail regardless.

The first priority is to get the DNS setup correctly. Using things like DMARC,DKIM, and SPF. Otherwise Microsoft, Google and Yahoo among others will likely refuse to deliver your mail, or just make you try sending again and again over a 24 hour period until they figure persistence pays. Gmail routinely rejects new mail servers that do not have DNS to their satisfaction for the first 24hours of attempting delivery. (most spammers only use a mail server for 24hours before changing to another. It is part of the cat and mouse game they play)

Need help setting up my domain name with godaddy and Thunderbird email client. need to get DNS Records from godaddy also. Having more trouble with this than I should, I think. I have already setup an email account on Thunderbird with earthlink/mindspring and icloud. No problems at all, in fact, both were very simple. But no so much with the domain name and godaddy. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Yeah, just grab the email server settings (MX, IMAP, SMTP) from GoDaddy’s DNS panel, then manually plug them into Thunderbird when setting up the account. Use the right ports + SSL. GoDaddy help docs usually list the exact info too.