First run

First run

Start TideMail with:

tidemail

Press M to open the account manager, then add your IMAP and SMTP details. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and iCloud have their servers built in. For a Custom account, TideMail can look the servers up from your email address: type the address in the Email / login row at the top of the form and move on, and if both host rows are still empty it looks the domain up. Press Ctrl+L to look up again at any time; that replaces whatever the host rows hold. TideMail tries, in order:

• SRV records (RFC 6186): _imaps._tcp for IMAP over TLS, then _submissions._tcp (port 465) or _submission._tcp for sending. A plain _imap._tcp record is ignored, because TideMail doesn't do IMAP STARTTLS and using it would send your password unencrypted.
• MX records: a domain whose mail is handled by Google (Workspace), Microsoft 365, iCloud or Yahoo switches the form to that provider, so its sign-in options apply.
• Autoconfig file: the Mozilla autoconfig file your own mail domain publishes, which cPanel and many other hosting panels serve automatically. TideMail asks only your domain, over HTTPS only: https://autoconfig.<domain>/mail/config-v1.1.xml, then https://<domain>/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.xml, passing your address so the host can fill in your login. It never asks Thunderbird's shared provider database. It uses only servers TideMail can reach securely (IMAP over TLS, sending over TLS or STARTTLS) with a password. If the file says your login is not your full address, the login row takes that login and your address moves to From address.

The lookup runs in the background and only fills in the form: nothing connects or saves until you press Ctrl+T or Ctrl+S. DNS answers aren't authenticated (and the autoconfig file is found through DNS), so check the servers it found before you save. If nothing is published, the status line says so and you enter the details yourself. If your provider requires an app password, create one before saving the account.

Changing or clearing the email removes settings still filled by its previous lookup, including an MX-selected provider. Server values you edited yourself stay; use Ctrl+L to replace them for the new address.

The status line sits one blank row below the form and keeps its place when there is no message, so updates do not shift the fields.

Ctrl+S and Ctrl+T check the form before anything connects, so a typo comes back as a labeled field rather than a login failure. A rejected row turns red and takes the cursor, with the reason on the status line; editing it clears the mark. Both hosts are required and are hostnames, not URLs, paths, or host:port pairs — the port belongs in its own field, where it must be a number between 1 and 65535. Leave a port blank to take the standard one. On the Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and iCloud providers the Email row must be a full address; a Custom account's Email / login is whatever your host issues, which need not be an address at all — cPanel's alice+example.com, an Exchange DOMAIN\alice, a bare ISP login. When it is not an address, the From address row becomes required: there is no address to send as otherwise, and the form says so rather than leaving the first send to be refused by the server.

Any field holding an address rejects # typed where @ belongs — info#example.com. On a Nordic layout @ is AltGr+2 and # is Shift+3, and nothing downstream can recover from the slip: # is legal inside an address, so the value stays a perfectly good string that no server can route. An address that really contains one, like info#sales@example.com, is untouched.

After you add an account, press s to sync the selected mailbox. Press s on the Unified Inbox to sync every account's inbox, or F to sync all mailboxes. With more than 10 folders, F first asks for confirmation, since syncing them all can take a while. When you stop on a non-inbox folder, TideMail silently refreshes it if its cache is more than 15 minutes old. Scrolling past folders does not queue refreshes; press Enter on a folder row when you want to fetch it immediately. Manual-only accounts fetch no mail on their own, not even at launch: they refresh only when you explicitly use Enter, s, or F. (TideMail still lists their folders once at launch so the folder tree stays current.) sync_minutes controls how an account refreshes on its own:

Value	Meaning
0	Push — IMAP IDLE delivers mail as it arrives, plus a 30-minute safety poll
N	Poll every N minutes, with IDLE accelerating it
-1	Manual only — no polling and no background connection

Push (0) is the default and the best choice for servers that support IDLE, including Gmail. The safety poll exists because IDLE goes silent on a connection that wedges without dropping, so push alone can stall with nothing to show for it. Use -1 if you want an account to refresh only when you press s.

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Source in TideMail at 64b0ddc