How to cancel Sky email so as to setup Thunderbird.
Some 2-3 years ago I switched ISP from Sky to Plusnet, but my wife did nothing and continued to use Sky email, and somehow it still worked.
Last week her PC was infected with the new Locky ransomware, attempts to remove the encryption proving fruitless, it was necessary to wipe the disc and restore a 2 month old image.
Everything else is now OK, she still receives email from Sky, BUT IS UNABLE TO SEND MAIL as she has no idea of her password – the couple she uses on sites that are not security risks do not work. I am no longer a customer of Sky for TV or email, and Sky mail now goes through Yahoo, who do not offer support.
So I set her up on my Plusnet account, in accordance with the instructions on their site, but at the end it asks for her Sky password. Stalemate.
I phoned Plusnet support again and was told it would be necessary to cancel the Sky account on Thunderbird, but as they do not support TB, could not tell me how to do so.
Unless somebody here knows how to cancel the Sky mail without knowing user name or password, it looks as though she’ll have to make do with the inconvenience of web mail.
Chosen solution
Have you tried looking for stored passwords in Thunderbird? It's highly likely that the same password is used in both incoming and outgoing accounts.
Tools|Options|Security|Passwords→Saved Passwords
You are trying to connect to an account hosted by sky.com. You're lucky that they permit this, and that the account is still active, given that you're now using another ISP.
No-one has suggested you leave plus.net - it's just that the change has caused you trouble and you could avoid this if you should ever change ISP again.
gmx? try using a search engine. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=gmx
Cheap international phone calls? Have you not heard of skype, or google hangouts? You can make calls, voice and optionally with video, to anywhere in the world for effectively no charge.
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My experience is that usually, if you need a new password, the admin gives you a temporary password that you can use once, to login, and in doing so you would be prompted to set up a new password. In email systems, it's customary to allow users to set their own passwords.
Generally, an admin doesn't need to know his users' passwords. There is a system known as hashing, where your password is passed through an encryption algorithm and turned into a big number (its "hash"). That hash value is stored. When you log in, the password you type in is re-hashed and the new hash value is compared with the stored hash value. If they are the same then you entered the right password, and so the admin never needs to know your password. The encryption method is designed so that given the hash, it's practically impossible to reverse engineer the original password. (Though some hashing algorithms have been found to be weak in this respect; several different passwords might result in the same hash and knowing this makes it slightly easier for a hacker to discover a password that lets him in.)
The greater concern over your email account being compromised (due to someone guessing your password) is not so much the violation of your privacy as the possibility of identity theft, where someone might be able to use your password to impersonate you. If they can read your emails, they can almost certainly send emails that appear to come from you. And many people do use the same password over and over again, so there's a good chance that the password will unlock other resources.
One way to defeat passwords and hashing is to use malware to install a key logger; if a bad program can eavesdrop on the keys you type, before they are hashed, then it knows your password. This is one of the main reasons to use good anti-malware programs and be sure that you don't have any unwelcome guests on board.