Setting up a mailbox and testing IMAP in Contact by Zaweba

Before Contact by Zaweba can turn a single email into an enquiry, it needs to know where your mail lives. That is the job of Settings > Mailboxes, the first stop for anyone setting the app up. You fill in a handful of details, press Test IMAP, and you find out exactly what will happen before a single message is fetched.

This article walks through each setting, explains what Test IMAP tells you, and covers the one snag that catches people out with the big mail providers.

What the Mailboxes page asks for

Contact reads incoming mail over IMAP and sends over SMTP, so the page asks for both. For reading you give the IMAP server, its port and its security setting, along with your user name and password. Your mail provider publishes these details, usually on a help page about setting up mail in another program, and they are the same ones you would type into any desktop email client.

For sending you give the SMTP server. You also list your own addresses, so Contact knows which mail is from you rather than from a customer, and you choose your Sent folder, so the copies of what you send end up where you expect them.

The password is handled with care. Contact encrypts it with Windows for this PC and this user, which means the stored copy is no use to anyone who lifts the file onto a different computer or signs in as someone else. Nothing about your mailbox goes to a Zaweba server.

What Test IMAP tells you

Typing server details is the part where mistakes creep in: a port number off by one, the wrong security option, a password with a stray space. Test IMAP connects with what you have entered and reports back in plain terms. It tells you how many messages the first check will fetch, which Sent folder will be used and which Junk folder will be used.

Each of those answers is worth reading rather than skimming. The message count shows whether you are pointed at the mailbox you meant. If you expected a few hundred emails and it reports tens of thousands, you may have the shared company account rather than your own, and it is much better to find that out now than after the first check has filled your lists.

The Sent folder matters because replies you send from Contact are filed there. Different providers name it differently, so check the test agrees with what you see in your usual email program.

The Junk folder matters for a different reason. When you file a sender as Spam in Contact, its mail in the server Inbox is moved to that mailbox's Junk folder. Seeing the right folder named in the test means spam will go where your other programs expect to find it.

Gmail, Microsoft 365 and app passwords

Microsoft 365, Exchange Online and Gmail normally need an app password rather than your ordinary sign-in password. Contact does not have OAuth2 built in, the sign-in-through-a-browser method those services prefer, so it connects with plain IMAP and SMTP credentials instead.

An app password is a separate password your provider generates for one program. You create it in your account's security settings, paste it into Contact's password box and leave your main password alone. If Test IMAP fails with a sign-in error on one of these services even though you are sure of your password, this is almost always the reason. Some business accounts have IMAP or app passwords switched off by an administrator, in which case they need switching on before Contact can connect.

Getting set up without surprises

Take a few minutes over the test before you leave the page. Run it, read all three answers, and only then let Contact do its first check. Because Contact reads mail without marking it read, deleting it or moving it (spam aside), the first check leaves your mailbox as it was, and your usual email program carries on as normal beside it.

If you run more than one business or brand, each one gets its own mailbox entry with its own servers, addresses and folders, so repeat the same steps for each. Test each mailbox on its own, because a setting that works for one provider rarely carries over to another.

Once the test comes back as you expect, the rest of the app opens up. Press Get emails, sort your first new senders in the Inbox, and the enquiries and customers start to build themselves from your real mail.