Email Client Support

Webmail

You can read and send mail from any web browser without installing software. Address books and user preferences are not shared between the two webmail options.

Email Settings

Use these settings to configure email in your phone or desktop mail program. Authentication is always required, and usernames are case-sensitive (use lowercase).

Setting up and using Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free desktop email program available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This section walks through configuring Thunderbird for your Pacific Internet account, explains how incoming mail is organized once you are connected, and shows two ways to combine the new Lists and Updates folders back into a single view.

Initial setup

Before you begin, have your full Pacific Internet email address (for example customer@pacific.net) and your email password on hand.

1. Open Thunderbird. If this is the first time you have used the program, the account setup window appears automatically. Otherwise choose File → New → Existing Mail Account… (or, from the menu, Account Settings → Account Actions → Add Mail Account…).
2. Enter your full name as you would like it to appear on outgoing messages, your full Pacific Internet email address, and your email password.
3. Click Continue. Thunderbird will attempt to detect the server settings automatically.
4. If automatic detection succeeds and offers IMAP, accept it and click Done. If automatic detection fails, or if you wish to enter the settings yourself, click Configure manually and use the values shown in the Email Settings tables above. The connection security values are SSL/TLS for IMAP (port 993) and STARTTLS for SMTP (port 587), and authentication is Normal password for both.
5. Click Re-test to verify the settings, then Done. Thunderbird will connect to the server and begin downloading your folder list.

How your mail is organized on the server

The Pacific Internet mail server pre-sorts incoming mail into folders under your account:

• INBOX — regular mail from people and organizations you communicate with.
• INBOX/Lists — mailing lists, newsletters, Substack, and similar bulk mail you have signed up to receive.
• INBOX/Updates — automated notifications such as receipts, billing notices, no-reply messages, and alerts.
• INBOX/Spam — junk mail and suspected phishing. See spam filtering for details. You will usually want to keep this folder separate.

If you would rather not have Lists and Updates split out, Thunderbird has two built-in ways to undo the split without any changes on the server.

Option 1 — Unified view (no messages are moved)

This option creates a virtual folder named All Inbox that shows the contents of INBOX, INBOX/Lists, and INBOX/Updates together. New mail arriving in any of those folders appears in the unified view automatically.

1. In the folder pane on the left, right-click your account name (for example, customer@pacific.net).
2. Choose New Saved Search…
3. For the folder name, enter All Inbox, or anything you prefer.
4. Click Choose… next to "Folders to search" and tick:
   • INBOX
   • INBOX/Lists
   • INBOX/Updates
   Do not tick INBOX/Spam.
5. Leave Include sub-folders unchecked.
6. Choose Match all messages so the view shows everything in the selected folders.
7. Click OK.

An All Inbox folder appears in your folder list. Use it the way you would normally use INBOX. New mail from Lists and Updates appears there automatically as it arrives.

Option 2 — Move Lists and Updates into INBOX

If you would rather have everything physically inside INBOX so the layout looks the same on every device and not only inside Thunderbird, set up two message filters that pull new mail out of Lists and Updates as it arrives.

1. Open Tools → Message Filters…
2. In the Filters for: dropdown, select your Pacific Internet account.
3. Click New… to create the first filter:
   • Filter name: Pull Lists into Inbox
   • Under "Apply filter when", tick Manually and Periodically (every 10 minutes).
   • For the matching rule, choose Match all messages. If that option is not available in your version of Thunderbird, add a trivially-true condition such as Subject — isn't empty.
   • Under "Perform these actions", choose Move Message to and select INBOX.
   • Click OK.
4. Repeat the same steps for INBOX/Updates, naming the second filter Pull Updates into Inbox.
5. After creating each filter, run it once on the matching source folder so existing messages are moved as well. Right-click INBOX/Lists in the folder pane and choose Run Filters on Folder, then do the same for INBOX/Updates.

The Periodically setting keeps the filters running about every ten minutes, so new mail arriving in Lists or Updates is pulled into INBOX shortly afterwards.

Spam handling is unchanged

Both options above leave spam handling alone. Junk mail and suspected phishing still go to INBOX/Spam, and the filtering system continues to learn from messages you move into or out of that folder. For details, see How to Use the Spam Filtering System.

Other email programs

Setup notes for additional email programs — including Apple Mail, Outlook, and mobile clients — will be added to this page as they are written. In the meantime, any program that supports standard IMAP and SMTP will work with the Email Settings shown above.