Mozilla Thunderbird is a popular alternative to Microsoft Outlook on both Windows and Apple's OSX (as well as Linux) so if you're looking to connect to your NetHosted email account with Thunderbird, the following guide will get you up and running.
1) Go to File -> New -> Existing Email Account
2) Enter your full name (as it will be displayed in other users email clients), your email address and your email account password (as set within cPanel)
3) Press Continue and on the next page select "Manual Config" which will present you with the following:
Incoming: IMAP/POP3 - This depends on what you wish to use. We recommend IMAP for uniform access across multiple devices
Server hostname: server.solardns.com - Replace "server.solardns.com" with the name of your server. For example, if you're on our Mercury server, you would type "mercury.solardns.com" in both Server hostname boxes
Port: This should be 993 for Incoming/IMAP, 995 for Incoming/POP3 and 465 for Outgoing/SMTP
SSL: SSL/TLS should be select for both Incoming and Outgoing
Authentication: Autodetect will work in most cases here, however if you encounter an issue, change this to "Normal password" from the drop down menu
Username: For both the Incoming and Outgoing Username options you should user user+domain.com as the format. So for david@google.com you would use david+google.com
That's it! If everything has been entered correctly, you'll now have your email account set up and ready to use within Thunderbird. If this is an existing IMAP account (or POP3 with the mail set to be left on the server) and you already have a large number of emails and folders these may take a few moments to download (depending on your internet connection) so do check back a little later. If you receive a connection error, double check all of your settings as above. If you're absolutely certain that the settings are correct, please submit a support ticket via our helpdesk with the error message you're receiving and we will be able to take a look into it for you.