Teapot

Connect to your mailbox

· Teapot admin

To connect to your mailbox you can use these settings on your favourite mail client. Our server uses SMTPS and IMAPS for communication.

  • Incoming server:

    Option Value
    Protocol IMAP(s)
    Hostname mail.teapot.ovh
    Port 993
    Connection Security SSL/TLS
    Authentication method Normal Password
    Username user@teapot.ovh 1

  • SMTP configuration:

    Option Value
    Protocol SMTP(s)
    Hostname mail.teapot.ovh
    Port 587
    Connection Security STARTTLS
    Authentication method Normal Password
    Username user@teapot.ovh 1

Mail sorting

As per RFC52332 our mail server supports so-called subaddressing. That is, when you receive an email at user+key@teapot.ovh, the key part does not make up part of your username, but instead is considered as “detailed addressing”. Our mail server uses this additional information to automatically sort your incoming mail in different folders based on this prefix3.

When the user user receives email at the address user+key@teapot.ovh, this message will be stored in the Sorted/Key folder (please mind, the automatic capitalization of key). If such a folder is not available at the moment of delivery, the system will automatically create it.

Subscribing to Sorted Folders

By default, most mail clients don’t synchronize these folders. While the configuration depends on the mail client being used, here are the steps required to show and actively synchronize the Sorted Folders in Mozzilla Thunderbird:

  1. Add your mail account as detailed earlier.
  2. Right-click on the mailbox in your navbar, and select Subscribe.
  3. Tick all the folders you are interested in subscribing to, including any folder under Sorted/. If they don’t show up, you can hit Refresh.
  4. Click OK. You should see the selected folders appear on the left-hand side.
  5. Although you can see the folders now, they are not synchronized by default. To fix that, you can right-click on each folder and select Properties. In the pop-up, tick When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder. Then finally save your changes by clicking OK.

  1. replace user with your username. ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. Sieve Email Filtering: Subaddress Extension, read more on IETF’s website. ↩︎

  3. NOTE: our configuration allows also the usage of the - character in place of the +, for use with nasty services which don’t allow the standard character in the mail address. ↩︎