How to use existing email addresses with your FastMail account

You can set up FastMail to send and receive email from other accounts you own so you can manage all of your mail in one place:

  1. Open the Settings → Accounts screen.

  2. At the bottom, type your other email address and your password for that account, then click "Add Account".

    For most accounts, that's all we require, but if we can't determine the server names we'll prompt you for them. In that instance, you'll have to find out what they are from your other email provider.

  3. If you only want to send email from the account, not receive it, uncheck the "Fetch mail" option. If you do want to fetch mail, you can also change which folder the mail is fetched into, and whether to delete the email from the original server.
  4. Click "Save Changes" in the bottom right of the screen.

Own domain? If your existing address is at a domain you own, you probably want to just host your domain with FastMail instead of fetching mail from your current email host.

Troubleshooting adding a Gmail or Yahoo account

If you're having difficulty adding a Gmail account, make sure that POP access is enabled. Sometimes, even if this is enabled and you entered your email and password correctly, Google still blocks our server as a "suspicious login". Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about that.

Yahoo users should similarly ensure POP access is enabled.

Errors while fetching mail

If you have "fetch mail" enabled and we cannot connect to the server, we'll send you an email to let you know. If 5 connection errors happen in a row, we'll automatically disable fetching mail. This usually happens because the password has been changed; you can update it on the Settings → Accounts screen.

Other errors you might see:

Timed out connecting to pop server — FastMail will allow up to 60 seconds to connect to an external server. If it takes longer than this, you'll receive this message. This usually means there are network problems between FastMail and the server you are trying to retrieve from. These are normally temporary, and the fetch will often succeed next time it tries.

POP Server does not support the UIDL command — Some rare POP servers don't support the UIDL command. To retrieve correctly from these servers, you must set the option to delete the copy from the original server.

Could not retrieve msg 'xyz' from server — this is a generic message when there are problems at the POP protocol level. The "Extra" field usually provides more technical error details. This usually means some low level error occurred. It's best to just retry the retrieve.

Could not deliver msg 'xyz' to mailbox — this is a generic message when an error occurs trying to deliver a retrieved message to your mailbox. The "Extra" field usually provides more details. The two most common reasons are over-quota accounts and "bad headers". If you receive a "bad header" message, please forward it to our support team.

A timeout occurred trying to download a pop message — FastMail will allow 30 seconds to download each message (plus 30 seconds per 500k of message data). This is normally sufficient for most connections, but some particularly slow ones may have problems. When a timeout occurs, FastMail will leave the message on the server, but depending on your settings it may or may not try and retrieve the message again. Read the error message for more details.