Connecting your mailboxes

Connecting a mailbox

Clarnix works alongside your existing email — it never replaces your mail app, and your messages stay where they are.

• Gmail — sign in with Google. Clarnix asks to read and organise your mail and to read your calendar in the same consent screen. If you decline the calendar part, everything else still works.
• Outlook — sign in with Microsoft.
• iCloud — a dedicated option that fills in Apple’s server settings for you.
• Any other provider — the generic IMAP form: your address, server, port, username and password.

Your password or access token is encrypted before it is stored, with a key derived for your account alone.

iCloud rejects my password

That is expected, and it is not a mistake on your part. Apple requires two-factor authentication on every Apple Account, which means no mail app can ever sign in with your normal Apple password. You need an app-specific password instead.

1. Generate an app-specific password in your Apple Account settings — Apple explains how at support.apple.com/en-us/102654.
2. Paste that password into the iCloud form in Clarnix instead of your usual one.
3. Leave the server and port as they are. The iCloud option fills them in for you.

Several other providers work the same way once two-factor authentication is on. If yours rejects a password that you know is correct, look for an "app password" in its security settings.

Nothing is saved until the password works

When you add an IMAP mailbox, Clarnix opens a real connection and lists your folders before saving anything. If the details are wrong, the mailbox is not created at all and you see the mail server’s own explanation — so there is never a half-connected mailbox to clean up, and never a mailbox that looks connected but quietly does nothing.

Gmail and Outlook go through their provider’s own sign-in, so there is no password for Clarnix to test.

Keeping a mailbox out of your briefing

Each mailbox has an "include in briefing" setting, on by default. Turn it off and the mailbox is still polled, its mail is still classified, and your rules still fire on it — it is simply left out of the briefing you read.

That is the right setting for a shared inbox you want automated but do not want to read about every morning. Switching the mailbox off entirely is different: that stops polling, classification and rules together.

If you exclude every mailbox, no briefing is generated at all. That is the most common reason briefings stop arriving unexpectedly.

A mailbox that stopped signing in

Passwords change and access gets revoked. Clarnix does not quarantine a mailbox over one bad moment: it takes at least five failures spread over at least a day before a mailbox is marked as broken, and a daily recheck can heal it on its own.

When a mailbox does break you get an email and a notification in the app. Use Reconnect on the mailbox to sign in again, or Update credentials for an IMAP mailbox whose password changed. Reminders follow at 7 and 30 days, and a mailbox still broken after 60 days is deactivated.

Disconnecting a mailbox

Disconnecting deletes the mailbox and its stored credentials from Clarnix and stops any further sync.

Disconnecting a single mailbox does not withdraw the permission you granted at Google or Microsoft. To remove that too, visit Google Account → Security → Third-party access, or your Microsoft account permissions page. Deleting your whole Clarnix account is handled differently — see the Settings page.