Account setup

How you add an account depends on the provider. Outlook and ordinary IMAP are straightforward. Gmail is not, and the reason is worth understanding before you start.

Outlook, Hotmail, Live, MSN

1. Add Account on the toolbar.
2. Enter your @outlook.com (or Hotmail/Live/MSN) address.
3. A Microsoft sign-in window opens. Sign in and approve the permissions.

Halyard asks for four things: keep access, read and write your mail, send from your mailbox, and send mail as you. Mail is read over IMAP and sent through Microsoft Graph.

Microsoft will describe the app as unverified. That is accurate — publisher verification is a formal Microsoft process this project has not completed. The app registration is real and the permissions are exactly the four listed above.

Gmail

Here is the honest reason. Google requires an app that reads Gmail to pass a security assessment costing thousands of dollars a year before it can offer a shared sign-in to the public. Halyard has not done that. The alternative would be shipping the developer’s own Google credentials inside the installer, which would mean every tester’s mailbox flowing through one personal Google Cloud project — bad for you, and against Google’s terms besides.

So instead you create a free Google Cloud project of your own. It takes a few minutes and leaves you holding the credentials. Your mail is yours and never touches anyone else’s project.

1. Add Account → Bring Your Own Key.
2. The wizard opens Google Cloud Console and tells you exactly what to click.
3. You will create a project, enable the Gmail API, and make an OAuth client of type Desktop app.
4. Add yourself as a test user on the consent screen. Skipping this is the single most common mistake — sign-in fails with an access error if you do.
5. Paste the Client ID and Client Secret into the wizard.

Those credentials are stored in Windows Credential Manager on your machine. They are not transmitted anywhere except to Google.

iCloud

1. Generate an app-specific password at appleid.apple.com → Sign-In and Security.
2. In Halyard: Add Account → Add IMAP Account.
3. Use the app-specific password, not your Apple ID password.

Apple rejects your real password over IMAP whenever two-factor is on, which for practical purposes is always.

Yahoo

1. Generate an app password in Yahoo Account Security.
2. Add Account → Add IMAP Account, and use it.

Anything else

Add Account → Add IMAP Account, then start typing your address. Halyard matches the part after the @ against a built-in table of 22 domains and fills in the four server fields for you. Covered today:

Not on the list? Enter the IMAP host and port and the SMTP host and port manually — your provider publishes all four. That is everything the dialog asks for.

Once you have typed in a host field yourself, autofill stops overwriting it, so correcting a typo in your address will not clobber settings you entered by hand. Note this is a fixed table, not autodiscovery — Halyard does not probe DNS for your provider's settings.

The first sync takes a while

Halyard downloads your mail into a local encrypted database so that search and browsing are instant afterwards. A large mailbox with years of history can take a long time on that first pass, and the progress display currently understates what is going on. It is working. Leave it running.

If mail has clearly finished downloading but the list still looks short, restart Halyard — it will be there. Nothing is lost either way; the messages are already in your local database.