If you still plan to use your Mozilla support account, then you will want to change it to an e-mail address you have control over.

Centurytel is your email provider. When you stop doing business with them you no longer have that email address. This has nothing to do with Thunderbird.

apparently email sent to my centurytel.net account is being forwarded to my Thunderbird email account? Where will that email go if I cancel my phone service with Centurytel? As far as I know, my Thunderbird email address is the same centurytel.net address. Can I change it to a Thunderbird address? I do have a different gmail address, and all my centurytel mail goes there too. I am very concerned about changing my email address, and for those I do not contact with the change, will I never see those emails in the future?

I just bought a new computer, and I am very frustrated to learn it is impossible to move my email history folders from the old computer to the new one, because Microsoft has chosen to not support Windows live Mail any longer. The Geeks at Best Buy and Staples assured me I am out of luck, so now if I want to look up old emails, I have to hope my old computer works forever so I can log on to that and see my folders history. This is one reason I changed to Thunderbird for my new email. Now I am confused as far as the address and if I will be missing emails sent to my old address.

There is no such thing as a Thunderbird account or Thunderbird email address. No mail is forwarded to Thunderbird. Thunderbird is an email client that you program to check your real, existing address on your providers server. As stated above when you cancel service with Centurytel your Centurytel address will no longer exist. You have a poor understanding of how email works. If you are concerned about changing your email address you probably should have not cancelled email service with your email provider.

very astute of you....yes it is obvious I do not understand how email works.......If I was as bright as you are I would not have to go on this forum to ask questions to get educated. Thanks

Happy to help enlighten you.

Sometimes advice has to be blunt to get the point across.

Email is sent to you by other people putting your email address into an email message. That email address is provided to you by your email provider and you tell us this has been centurytel.net. They run (or pay someone else to run) a server which accepts messages sent to your address. All Thunderbird does is connect to that server and ask it for any new messages.

Once you close the ISP account, the only safe assumption is that the associated email account (and its address) will cease to exist. People sending to it will get an error message telling them that the address cannot be found.

I have heard of cases where a user is able to acquire or pay for an alternative (possibly dial-up) account with the old ISP just to retain the email account. I don't think this is a common situation. Most ISPs offer email as a side benefit and I suspect many of them see it as an unwelcome distraction and expense. Providing email, even when charging the account user, may not be financially attractive to them.

I think you need to assume that your old email account will just stop working and you need to set about getting yourself a new account and advising your correspondents about the change.

You do not have to use the email service offered by your ISP. In fact, if you had an account with a provider other than your ISP (e.g. yahoo, outlook.com, gmail, aol, gmx) you could have carried on using that account (and its email address) regardless of which ISP you use.

So I'd say look at these free providers. Look around for both positive and negative comments about them. You'll find many negative comments. Gmail works, but you sell your soul to them. Outlook and yahoo are hardly any better in terms of their monitoring of your activities, and I would say they both have less good reputations than gmail in terms of their technical expertise. I do have an AOL account and "it just works". But I am wary of them from way back, when an AOL user would be expected to install custom software and find that everything had been tweaked to use an AOL portal and insert intrusive branding and editorial content. My current personal preference is gmx.

All of these services can be used via Thunderbird. If you want to do any email with an Android phone, then despite all the reservations about privacy, gmail is the no-brainer choice.

As to you new computer. Unfortunately most Geek Squad employees could not spell PC if you spot them the first letter. Move your profile to the new computer with these instructions. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer

Postscript. I see you say you already have a gmail address. So you could start telling your correspondents to use that instead.

And going back to Moses' point, for this forum, if you gave it the centurytel.net address, I'd suggest you change the settings for your account on this forum to use the gmail account.

Airmail said

As to you new computer. Unfortunately most Geek Squad employees could not spell PC if you spot them the first letter. Move your profile to the new computer with these instructions. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer

that might help if I had all my email folder history on thunderbird on my old computer. The problem is........Windows Live mail will not allow me to export email history (intact in folders) to ANY other email account. I went round and round with a Microsoft employee who insisted it is not possible as they refuse to service their old email system and then had the gall to design the replacement email system (Win Mail?) so that it would not accept Win Live Mail history. They say Ford does not still support Model Ts, so why should they support old systems they sold us in the past. I say, if they cared at all for customer satisfaction, they would make it easy to move data from the old system to the new system. AND.........why not make it a whole lot easier to set up a new computer? They could do it easily without a doubt! But with their monopoly, they have no interest or motivation to do things right and make it so buying a new computer does not have to be a nightmare every time.