Automatic email setup, and what to do when it fails

Most mail apps try to configure themselves. You type your email address, the app looks your domain up, and it fills in the servers, the ports and the encryption for you. When that works, there is nothing else to type.

What automatic setup does — and does not — do

It fills in the technical parts. It does not sign you in. You still enter your full email address as the username and an app password as the password — a mail app cannot use your MyPandos account sign-in.

Which apps use it

• Outlook looks for an autodiscover record on your domain.
• Thunderbird looks for an autoconfig record.
• Apple Mail, and Mail on iPhone and iPad: choose the Other account type — not iCloud and not Exchange — and they will often complete the setup for you.
• Android mail apps vary. Many find the settings; all of them accept the manual values below.

We publish those records for you

When we host your domain's mail and manage its DNS, the autoconfig and autodiscover records go in as part of setting the domain up, alongside the records your mail needs in order to be delivered and trusted. The Email tab of your service lists every one of those records and shows whether it is in place.

There are two cases where they are deliberately absent:

• Your mail is still delivered by your previous provider. We do not publish these records while that is true. They tell mail apps where to connect, so publishing them early would send every app that reads them to the wrong server while your mail still arrives somewhere else. They go in when your mail moves across.
• Someone else runs your domain's DNS. Then the records have to be added there. The Email tab lists exactly what to add, and rechecks them for you afterwards.

These two records only make setup easier. Your mail is delivered, sent and signed without them, and a mail app set up by hand works exactly as well as one set up automatically.

When your app cannot find the settings

You will see something like “we couldn't find the settings for your account”, or the app will drop you onto a manual setup screen. That is not a fault with your mailbox. Two quick checks before you type anything in:

• Check the address for a typo. An app looks up the part after the @, so one wrong letter there means it is asking about a domain that is not yours.
• Give DNS time. If your domain was set up in the last few hours, an app that found nothing earlier may succeed later. You do not have to wait — the manual settings work immediately.

The manual settings

Choose manual or advanced setup and create an IMAP account. Your username is your full email address and your password is an app password.

• Incoming, IMAP (recommended): port 993, SSL/TLS
• Incoming, POP3 (only if your app offers nothing else): port 995, SSL/TLS
• Outgoing, SMTP: port 465, SSL/TLS
• Outgoing, SMTP alternative: port 587, STARTTLS

The server name for both incoming and outgoing is shown with these settings on the Email tab of your service. Use that exact name. A name guessed from your own domain is the most common cause of a certificate warning followed by a connection that never completes.

If your app asks how outgoing mail should authenticate, tell it to use the same username and password as incoming.

It connected, but mail still will not send or receive

• “Password incorrect”: the app is using your MyPandos account password. It needs an app password.
• A certificate warning: the server name is wrong. Replace it with the one on the Email tab rather than accepting the warning.
• Mail arrives but will not send: outgoing mail is not authenticating. Turn on authentication for the outgoing server and give it the same email address and app password.