How to Set Up GoDaddy Email on Your Desktop

Updated September 11, 2019

When you sign up for GoDaddy web hosting, you’ll also receive email hosting with your account. Even though GoDaddy provides access to your inbox through Webmail on your browser, it’s not always all that convenient. That’s why it’s nice to be able to set up your own desktop mail client for continual access to your GoDaddy workspace email account, and it’s quick and simple to get started.

Install Thunderbird

This guide is going to focus on Mozilla Thunderbird because it’s a full featured client that’s completely free and available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you have another client that you’d prefer to use, you can certainly do so, and the instructions will be similar, but they won’t match up exactly.

Thunderbird doesn’t take much time to get set up. Head over to the Thunderbird download page, and grab the latest release. The installer will walk you through the process. It’s fairly self-explanatory, and it should only take a few minutes to run through. The defaults options will work in most cases.

If you’re on Linux, you can probably find a Thunderbird package in your distribution’s repositories. It’s usually called ‘thunderbird.’

How to Access Your GoDaddy Email on the Desktop

GoDaddy web-based email is servicable, but it might not be exactly what you'd like to have. That's not a problem. You can easily setup a desktop client to retrieve your messages.

If you already know your GoDaddy email account, you’re ahead of the game. Otherwise, sign in to your account, and open your hosting package. Select cPanel Admin to open a cPanel tab.
Scroll down in the cPanel tab, and select Email Accounts.
Here, you’ll see your email accounts listed. If you haven’t already created one, you can click Create to set one up for yourself.
Once you know your full email address, you can go ahead and launch Thunderbird.
As soon as Thunderbird starts, it’ll ask you to set up your account. Enter the name you want to appear when you send mail. Then enter the email address that you set up in cPanel, followed by the associated password. When you’re done, press Continue.
Thunderbird will spring into action, looking up your email address and trying to detect the mail server settings. It may take a few minutes, but if you configured everything correctly on GoDaddy, Thunderbird will find the correct settings. When it does, press Done to add your account.
If your account settings weren’t detected correctly, like in the example above, you can always manually configure them by pressing Manual config in the lower left. Keep in mind that if you set up an Outlook email address, you will need to manually configure the ones tied to cPanel.

On the manual configuration screen, change the IMAP address to mail. followed by your domain. Set the port to 143. Set the SMTP address to mail. and your domain too. The port for that one is 587. Your username is the full email address.

When you’re done, press Re-test to make sure that Thunderbird can now connect. If it can, press Done.
You may see a warning that the account isn’t secure. Confirm that you still want to connect. Thunderbird may take a few minutes to get set up. Then, you’ll arrive at your inbox, ready to use.