LUS Fiber Email POP or IMAP Choice?

[Gottabeaway]

First off, I'm no expert but pretty comfortable with computers.
Instructions to add a new email account for Thunderbird, suggest that
this has to be POP account rather than IMAP, and that SSL (security
feature that encrypts your User ID and password) is not supported. Is
this the only choice- to use simple POP without SSL, i.e., no password
security? I have had good success with gmail.com and me.com which are
both IMAP and utilize SSL- both sync beautifully over my iPhone and
Mac. I guess that I don't have to use a lusfiber.net email address,
but it would be nice to have the choice, and also important for LUS
Fiber success, as I want them to do well. I had set up my COX email
address account in Thunderbird (and also in Gmail) with POP and SSL,
(but not IMAP which is not possible with COX). I don't have any
interest in using the LUS webmail site, but I understand if others do
like it. In my opinion, it is clumsy compared to full-featured Gmail
with addons. For standalone email access, I prefer Thunderbird with
addons. Does anyone know how to setup lusfiber.net email using IMAP or
POP with SSL, or should I just blow it off and use Gmail, etc? In my
testing phase in the latest version of Thunderbird, it indicates
active LUS fiber servers that are using IMAP with StartSSL, but I
would need a StartSSL personal certificate, and I have no confirmation
that this would work or be worth it. Could LUS be using IMAP and
StartSSL in their own webmail product? I know that LUS uses IMAP
servers for iPhone's webmail setup, but using their provided pdf file,
i tried unsuccessfully to adapt these instructions for Thunderbird-
probably because it can only be setup in standalone as POP. Can anyone
help me at least setup SSL support with POP?

[Gottabeaway]

I successfully setup my iPhone to check email via IMAP using the
instructions provided by LUS Fiber. It was a bit of a challenge to
setup my LUS fiber acct email address in Thunderbird using IMAP with
STARTTLS and password encryption, but finally got everything working
great. Incoming server is imap.lusfiber.net on port 143 with STARTTLS
enabled with password encryption enabled. The certificate from LUS was
considered by Thunderbird to be invalid, but allowed me to make a
permanent exception to trust the LUS STARTTLS certificate "cgp-
f1.lusfiber.net" issued by CommuniGate Systems, Inc. This certificate
expires in 2028, and is identified as experimental by LUS. I suspect
one of the LUS engineers set this certificate up for this purpose. I
did not need to get my own STARTTLS certificate to make this setup
work. The outgoing server was setup with imap.lusfiber.net on port 25
and enabling of STARTTLS and enabling password encryption. Incoming
and outgoing email with this IMAP lusfiber.net account is now working.
Within Pronto Webmail I enabled forwarding of my lusfiber.net email to
my Gmail account, but I could have done this in Thunderbird instead.
Eventually I'll use only the outstanding Gmail and Google calendar
products primarily for the syncing capabilities, but also for the
filtering, customization, and cool "lab" add-ons that are available. I
like having an additonal lusfiber.net email address in addition to my
gmail address. I'm not quite ready to give up Thunderbird, but I
probably will in the near future. By the way, a few days ago Gmail
enabled an optional 2 part verification procedure for email access for
greater security- anyone tried it yet?