braddx said

I just found out Thunderbird is free. I've been paying $8.95a month for years. Can anybody tell me why? And Can I easily go from paying to free without losing saved emails? Thank you.

The question is: Who is the happy collector of your money?

Just install Thunderbird from https://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird and your e-mails should show up.

Thunderbird is free email client software. There is an offer to purchase an email account from a 3rd party vendor when you first configure the software. It sounds like you took that option. You do have to have a working email account with an email provider. There are plenty of free email providers to choose from.

Tks to both of you - finally got around to checking it out - apparently I signed up for it 12 years ago! Due to an unasked for change in my telephone line supplier. The new world tech stuff sometimes defeats me. "Do not go gently into that dark night", said Dylan Thomas. I'm ready to go - gently or otherwise.

You need to know the difference between an email provider and email client software. Thunderbird is the latter.

Thanks - I'm reading up on that - it's confusing. Another question - does the free version give you 3 emails or just the one? The premium version allows three. Also, the premium version (@$7.95/mo) gives me 10 "anonymous" emails which I can use "anonymously" (but I don't understand what that is supposed to mean).

Thank you for your help and patience.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Thunderbird is free email client software that runs on your computer to help manage the email accounts you get from an email provider. There are no email accounts. There is no premium version. It is email client software.

It sounds like you might be talking about a company who is providing you with an internet connection; an Internet Service Provider (ISP). You have to pay that company to have access to the internet. In the UK, there are a various companies such as BT, Virginmedia, TalkTalk, Plusnet etc.

They would create an account for you and charge you for internet connectivity. The company would also provide you with an email address. Many allow you to create additional email addresses with same ISP. You can access your email by using a browser eg: Mozilla Firefox. You logon to your ISP website to see emails. This is known as webmail.

You can also get free email addresses such as googles 'gmail'. But you would still need to pay an ISP to get access to the internet.

Thunderbird is an email client; a program downloaded to your computer. Thunderbird is a free program. It is not a server and it does not offer a Thunderbird email address. Thunderbird is just a free program running on your computer which faciliates viewing emails from a variety of email addresses, so that you can access them all in one place instead of logging on to the various webmail accounts.

You can purchase a new individually created email address with eg: 'gandi.net'. Thunderbird has created a partnership with this company, so that people could create a new email address with that company. This contract would be with that company and not with Thunderbird. You would have to pay for the service with that company.

In Thunderbird you can create any number of 'mail accounts'. Each mail account will be for a different email address. This allows Thunderbird to access the server and download emails giving you the ability to read and respond to emails.

In your email address, what do you have after the '@' sign? Who provides your internet; your ISP ?