Testing guide
Work through as much of this as you have patience for. Each step says what should happen — if what you see differs, that is exactly what we want to hear about.
1. Install and license
- Installer completes without errors.
- A License Required dialog appears on first launch.
- A wrong key gives a clear message and lets you retry — no crash, no silent nothing.
- A correct key gets you straight in.
- Closing and reopening does not ask again.
2. Adding an account
- The Welcome screen appears on a fresh install with no accounts.
- Sign-in opens your browser and returns to the app cleanly.
- The browser tab says “Signed in” and the app moves on by itself.
If the browser lands on an error page saying it cannot reach
localhost, please tell us — and say which browser. That
specific failure was fixed very recently, and confirming it is gone is
genuinely useful.
3. Reading mail
- Folders appear in the sidebar with sensible names.
- Clicking a message shows it in the reading pane.
- Attachments open and save.
- Selecting a message while a sync is running keeps your place — it should not jump back to the top of the list. Please try this one specifically.
4. Sending
- New Mail, Reply, Reply All, Forward.
- Send to yourself and confirm it arrives.
- If you use Outlook or Hotmail, send from it. Those accounts send over Microsoft Graph rather than SMTP. It is believed working; a confirmation from a real account is genuinely useful.
- Send one message with a Bcc. Confirm the hidden recipient received it and is not visible to the others. This is a specific gap we have not proven.
5. Spam
- Mark Spam moves the message to Spam.
- Not Spam from inside Spam returns it to the Inbox.
- Neither one leaves a duplicate behind.
6. The ordinary things
- Delete, Archive, Move to, Mark Read, Mark Unread.
- Search finds messages by subject, sender and body.
- Sorting by clicking column headers.
- Closing the app while a sync is running exits cleanly and does not hang.
Already known in this build
These are known and being worked on. They are listed so you can tell them apart from anything new.
- The first sync after updating asks you to sign in to Google again. This build requests one extra permission, and Google requires fresh consent whenever the permissions change. The screen mentions your calendar — which this build now reads to fill the Calendar view. Approving it is safe. If you would rather not, tell us — that is useful to know.
- Google will warn you that it has not verified Halyard. That is expected, and here is exactly what it means. You will see a screen headed “Google hasn’t verified this app”. Click Advanced, then Go to Halyard Mail (unsafe). The word “unsafe” is Google’s wording for any app whose publisher has not paid for and passed a formal security audit — it is a statement about paperwork we have not filed, not a finding about the software. Halyard is a desktop program: your mail goes between your computer and Google, and there is no Halyard server in between. What it does with your data is written out in full on the privacy policy. If that is not good enough for you, do not click through — say so instead, and that is a completely reasonable answer.
- Halyard sometimes does not close. Closing the window can leave the program running with nothing on screen, using a whole CPU core. If Halyard will not start again, or the PC sounds busy after you closed it, open Task Manager, find Halyard Mail and choose End task. This one is real and we know about it; this build records what it was doing on the way out so we can find it, so if it happens to you the feedback report genuinely helps.
Fixed since the last build
If you were told about any of these, or hit them yourself, they are gone in this one:
- Attachments disappearing after you read a message. Opening a message could make its attachments vanish a few minutes later, at the next sync. That no longer happens. To get back ones already lost, choose Tools → Repair Missing Attachments on each account after updating. It asks your mail server which messages have attachments and downloads them again; on a large mailbox it can take an hour or more, and Halyard stays usable meanwhile.
- Some attachments never arriving. PDFs and other files from senders who label their attachments a particular way (Gmail on the web does) were skipped entirely. They are kept now, and Repair Missing Attachments fetches the ones that were missed.
- No paperclip in the message list. The paperclip that marks a message with attachments was never drawn. It shows now.
- Pictures missing from emails that carry their own images. In an email with pictures built into it — a USPS Informed Delivery digest, for example — none of its images appeared, not even the ones Halyard had already downloaded. They all show now.
- Signing in to the wrong mailbox. Re-Authenticate saved whichever Google account you picked in the browser, so one account could quietly start downloading someone else's mail. Halyard now refuses a sign-in for a different address and tells you which one you picked.
Where to send it
Send feedback — it is in the menu at the top of every page on this site, so you can get to it whenever you hit something, without hunting for a link.
What to report
The more of this you can include, the faster it gets fixed:
- What you did, step by step.
- What you expected, and what happened instead.
- Your email provider (Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo, other).
- Any exact error text — a screenshot is ideal.
- Whether it happens every time, or only sometimes.