Adding an account, changing one, testing it, and removing it all happen in Manage Accounts. Open it from File → Manage Accounts…, from the Accounts button on the toolbar, or from the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) by choosing Manage Accounts. It has no keyboard shortcut of its own to begin with; you can give it one under Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts.
Manage Accounts opens with focus on the first entry in the Accounts list, so you can arrow through your accounts straight away. New, Delete, and Set Default sit below the list; the settings for whichever account is selected fill the rest of the window; Save, Test Connection, and Close are at the bottom. When you have no accounts yet there is nothing to land on, so focus goes to New instead.
For most accounts you need three things: your provider, your email address, and your password. QuickMail knows the server settings for the providers it lists, and looks them up for the ones it does not.
Provider is the first field in the Add Account dialog, because what you choose there fills in everything below it. The list holds:
Other comes first rather than last so that Down arrow reaches the rest from where the dialog puts you. Choosing a provider announces what it did — “Gmail settings applied”, or the app-password requirement where the provider has one. Choosing Other tells you to enter your server settings under Advanced settings, and opens that section for you.
Often you need not touch the list at all: typing an address at one of these providers selects it for you. Correcting the address afterwards drops the provider again, so an address you have retyped is never saved against the previous provider’s servers.
A provider is fixed when the account is created. Manage Accounts shows it as text at the top of the account’s settings rather than as a list you can change — to move an account to a different provider, remove it and add it again.
Press New in Manage Accounts. The Add Account dialog opens with focus on the Provider list.
Server names, ports, and SSL settings are behind Advanced settings, an expander that stays closed unless you need it. Tab reaches its header before its contents, so one keystroke moves past the whole thing.
If something required is missing, Add Account does not close the dialog. It says what is missing and moves focus to the field that needs attention — the email address, the password, or, when there are no server settings at all, the IMAP host with Advanced settings opened for you.
If you type an address QuickMail does not recognize — a work or university address, for example — it looks the settings up when you leave the Email field. You hear “Looking up settings for yourdomain” while it runs, then one sentence when it finishes: the servers QuickMail settled on and where they came from, or that nothing was found.
QuickMail tries, in order:
Step 4 matters for business mail. Most Microsoft 365 and Google
Workspace customers use their own domain —
you@yourcompany.com — and publish nothing that steps 2 and
3 can read. Without it, a perfectly ordinary work account ends at “enter
your IMAP host”, for an account that has no IMAP host to enter: the way
in is a sign-in. When your domain’s mail is delivered to Microsoft,
QuickMail selects Outlook.com / Microsoft 365 and
offers Sign in with Microsoft; when it is delivered to
Google, it selects Gmail.
This step reads where your mail goes, rather than who your organisation is with. That distinction matters: a domain keeps its Microsoft account long after its mail has moved elsewhere, and plenty of companies run their own mail while using Microsoft 365 for everything else. Asking the first question would put Microsoft’s servers on an account that is not on Microsoft’s mail, and your password would be rejected. If QuickMail still gets it wrong, change the Provider, or open Advanced settings and enter your own servers.
Settings that arrive over the network are never accepted unless they are encrypted, so a lookup can never quietly hand your password to a server that would take it in the clear. Servers you type yourself are your own business and are left alone.
When nothing is found, Advanced settings opens automatically and focus moves to the IMAP host field, so you can type the settings yourself. The message also names the way out for a work or school Microsoft 365 account, which has no IMAP host to type: choose Outlook.com / Microsoft 365 as the provider and sign in.
To turn off steps 2, 3, and 4, set
AutoDiscoverOnline = off in config.ini. The
built-in provider list keeps working either way.
Choose Other, or open Advanced settings for any provider, to enter:
Advanced settings opens by itself in the two cases where you have no choice but to use it: when you choose Other, and when a settings lookup finds nothing.
Anything you enter here is yours to keep. Once you have changed a server field — a host, a port, or an SSL setting — no provider match and no later lookup overwrites it.
There is one exception, and it applies only to accounts you have never saved in Manage Accounts. At startup, if such an account points at a server QuickMail ships settings for, on the exact port QuickMail publishes for that server, and the encryption setting disagrees with the published one, the encryption setting is corrected. That pairing cannot work — implicit SSL against a STARTTLS port fails every send about a second after you press the button — so leaving it alone would only preserve a broken account. One of those servers on any other port is left exactly as you set it, and once you have saved an account yourself nothing touches it again.
For almost every account these are the same thing, and the Login username box under Advanced settings stays empty.
They come apart when your mail provider keeps a separate account name. An iCloud mailbox that receives mail at your own domain still signs in under the Apple ID; some hosted servers want a bare user name rather than a full address. In that case:
you@yourdomain.com. This is what recipients see in the From
line of everything you send, so it has to be an address that works.Putting the login name in the Email address box instead sends mail with a From line that is not an address, and servers reject it. QuickMail will not save an account whose email address is missing its domain; the message points you at the Login username box.
If you already had an account set up that way, QuickMail copies the login name into Login username for you the first time it starts after the update — so when you correct the Email address, the login that was working goes on working. You only need to enter the address.
Test Connection is on both the Add Account dialog and Manage Accounts, so it is as useful on an account that has stopped working as on one you are still setting up. In Manage Accounts it appears as soon as an account is selected.
QuickMail checks incoming and outgoing mail separately and reports both — “IMAP: OK. SMTP: OK.” A failure names its own side and gives the reason, so a working inbox with a misconfigured send server is caught here rather than the first time you try to send. Neither check waits longer than 30 seconds; one that runs out of time reports that it timed out rather than leaving you waiting.
Microsoft 365 accounts are tested too, by asking Microsoft for the signed-in mailbox: “Microsoft 365 connection successful.” Sign in first, so there is an account to test.
The result is announced and stays on screen as status text near the buttons. In the Add Account dialog the button disables itself while the test runs, and focus returns to it when the result arrives.
QuickMail signs in to Microsoft mailboxes rather than asking for a password — work or school Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online accounts and personal Outlook.com / Hotmail / Live.com accounts alike.
Sign in as the same address you typed into the account. If the account you sign in with does not match, QuickMail warns you and keeps the address you entered rather than silently switching to a different mailbox — this matters most in organizations where an administrator signs in at the approval screen.
Work or school accounts connect through Microsoft 365 directly (the Microsoft Graph service), so there are no server names or ports to enter. QuickMail arranges that for you: an address on your organization’s own domain — anything other than outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, msn.com, or passport.com — moves onto that connection method as you type it. The reason is that most organizations have never approved the separate IMAP and SMTP permissions, and many switch IMAP off altogether, so a work account left on IMAP ends its sign-in at “your administrator needs to make a change” for a mailbox that signs in perfectly well the other way.
Personal Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Live.com accounts connect over IMAP with the same Microsoft sign-in. There is no organization involved and nothing to approve, so this route needs no change.
You can also choose for yourself. Open Advanced settings and use the Connection method list to pick Standard IMAP/SMTP or Microsoft 365 (Graph); choosing Graph announces that IMAP and SMTP settings are not required, and choosing IMAP fills the Outlook server settings back in. This choice is fixed when the account is created — to change it later, remove the account and add it again.
Work or school accounts may need your administrator’s approval first. Many organizations require an administrator to approve a new app for the whole organization before anyone can sign in. If your sign-in ends at a “needs admin approval” message with no way to continue, QuickMail is working correctly — your organization has not yet approved it. Send your IT administrator to For Microsoft 365 Administrators and Tenant Owners; once they approve QuickMail, sign-in works normally. Personal Outlook.com accounts are not affected and need no approval.
To bring this account’s contacts into your address book, check Sync contacts from this account before signing in. See Syncing Contacts from Your Accounts.
To show this account’s calendar in the Calendar view, check Sync calendar from this account. See the Calendar section for details.
Use a Gmail app password. Google sign-in is currently blocked for new QuickMail accounts, so an app password is what works today, and it is what QuickMail selects when you choose Gmail or type a Gmail address.
Enter the app password, not your regular Google password. Gmail’s server settings fill in automatically.
App passwords are not offered if your account is enrolled in Google’s Advanced Protection Program. This route gives you full mail — send, receive, folders, search — but not Google calendar or contact sync, which need the Google sign-in described below and available only to accounts authorized before Google closed it.
Google stopped granting QuickMail new authorizations, so for most people the sign-in route can only end in a refusal — which is why QuickMail no longer offers it by default. If your Google account was authorized before that happened, it still works, and you can turn the option back on:
You now have a Gmail (sign in with Google) entry in the Provider list, sitting directly below plain Gmail, and a Google OAuth (Gmail) choice under Advanced settings → Authentication.
Choose Gmail (sign in with Google) and there is no password box at all — Gmail’s servers fill in as usual and a Sign in with Google button takes the password’s place. Activate it; your browser opens to a Google sign-in page. Complete the sign-in, grant QuickMail permission to read and send mail, then close the browser window and activate Add Account.
If you would rather not use the Settings dialog, the same switch is
GoogleAuth = true under [features] in
config.ini, or --feature GoogleAuth on the
command line.
Accounts you already have are not affected by this setting. A Gmail account that already signs in with Google keeps working whether the setting is on or off, keeps syncing mail, contacts, and calendar, and still shows Google OAuth (Gmail) as its authentication in Manage Accounts. The setting governs only whether the option is offered when you set an account up.
To bring this account’s contacts into your address book, check Sync contacts from this account before signing in — for Google this is folded into the same sign-in consent. See Syncing Contacts from Your Accounts.
To show this account’s calendar in the Calendar view, check Sync calendar from this account — Google’s calendar permission is part of the same sign-in. See the Calendar section for details.
With Google sign-in you may see a message that no password was saved for the account. This is expected — Gmail signs in through your Google account rather than a stored password, so there is no password to save. The sign-in itself is stored securely in Windows Credential Manager and refreshes automatically.
Google also shows a warning that QuickMail is an unverified app, and may end the sign-in with “This app has been blocked.” That message means your account is not one of the ones authorized earlier, and no setting in QuickMail can change it — Google’s app-verification process can take several weeks and may require an expensive third-party security assessment. The app password route above is the reliable path.
Choose Yahoo Mail or type your Yahoo address
(@yahoo.com, @ymail.com,
@rocketmail.com, and the regional variants).
App password required. Yahoo does not accept your regular account password from third-party mail apps. Generate one at login.yahoo.com/account/security under App passwords, and enter it in the Password field. QuickMail links to that page when Yahoo is selected.
Choose iCloud Mail or type your iCloud address
(@icloud.com, @me.com, or
@mac.com) — QuickMail fills in Apple’s server settings
automatically.
App-specific password required. Apple does not allow third-party apps to use your Apple ID password directly. Generate an app-specific password at appleid.apple.com (Sign-In & Security → App-Specific Passwords) and enter it in the Password field. QuickMail shows a reminder above the password box, with a link to that page.
To bring in your iCloud data, check Sync contacts from this account and/or Sync calendar from this account — QuickMail uses the same app-specific password for both, so there’s nothing else to set up. iCloud contacts are read-only; iCloud calendars you can also add, edit, and delete single (non-repeating) appointments on. See Syncing Contacts from Your Accounts and the Calendar section for details.
Select an account in the Accounts list and its settings appear beside it. You can change:
Press Save — the default button, so Enter is enough — to keep the changes. The two sync checkboxes are the exception: they apply the moment you change them, with no Save step. Switching one on asks for the permission it needs and pulls the first batch immediately; switching it off removes what had been synced. iCloud prompts for nothing, because it uses the app-specific password you already entered.
Sign in with Microsoft and Sign in with Google are here too, for when a sign-in needs renewing.
Set Default marks the selected account as your default — the account new messages are sent from unless you choose another, and the one new mail rules are created for. The default account is announced as “default” alongside its name in the list.
Server settings sit behind the same Advanced settings expander as in Add Account, so an account that is working needs no scrolling past hosts and ports to reach the settings people actually change. The Provider at the top is fixed when the account is created; to change it, remove the account and add it again.
Select the account and press Delete. There is no confirmation step, and the removal happens at once: QuickMail forgets the account’s password from Windows Credential Manager, deletes the mail it had cached, removes any contacts synced from it, and for Microsoft and Google accounts signs out as well. You hear “Account deleted. Cleaning up…”, then “Account deleted.” when the tidying has finished.
Nothing is deleted from the mail server. Removing an account removes it from QuickMail only — add it again and your mail is still there.