FairEmail/SETUP.md

Setup help

Setting up FairEmail is fairly simple. You'll need to add at least one account to receive email and at least one identity if you want to send email.

Requirements

An internet connection is required to add accounts and identities.

Your email provider should support secure connections. If your provider doesn't support secure connections and you care at least a little about your privacy, you are strongly advised to switch to another provider.

For security reasons, your account should not have a non empty password.

Quick setup

Just enter your name, email address and password and tap Quick setup.

This will work for most major email providers.

If the quick setup doesn't work, you'll need to setup an account and an identity in another way, see below for instructions.

To use Gmail, you'll need to enable access for "less secure" apps, see here for Google's instructions or go directy to the setting. Less secure is relative and other providers just allow access in the same way, but if you are concerned you can complete the setup by setting up an account and an identity in another way too, see below.

Account - to receive email

To add an account, tap on Manage accounts and tap on the orange add button at the bottom. Select a provider from the list, enter the username, which is mostly your email address and enter your password. If you use Gmail, tap Select account to fill in the username and password. Tap Check to let FairEmail connect to the email server and fetch a list of system folders. After reviewing the system folder selection you can add the account by tapping Save.

If your provider is not in the list of providers, select Custom. Enter the domain name, for example gmail.com and tap Get settings. If your provider supports auto-discovery, FairEmail will fill in the host name and port number, else check the setup instructions of your provider for the right IMAP host name and port number. For more about this, please see here.

Identity - to send email

Similarly, to add an identity, tap on Manage identity and tap on the orange add button at the bottom. Enter the name you want to appear in de from address of the emails you send and select a linked account. Tap Save to add the identity.

See this FAQ about using aliases.

Permissions - to access contact information

If you want to lookup email addresses, have contact photos shown, etc, you'll need to grant read contacts permission to FairEmail. Just tap Grant permissions and select Allow.

Battery optimizations - to continuously receive email

On recent Android versions, Android will put apps to sleep when the screen is off for some time to reduce battery usage. If you want to receive new emails without delays, you should disable battery optimizations for FairEmail. Tap Disable battery optimizations and follow the instructions.

Questions

If you have a question or problem, please see here.