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FairEmail – Unterstützung

Wenn Sie eine Frage haben, lesen Sie bitte zuerst die unten stehenden häufig gestellten Fragen. Im unteren Bereich finden Sie die Möglichkeit, weitere Fragen zu stellen, Funktionen anzufordern und Fehler zu melden.

Verzeichnis

Konten autorisieren

In den meisten Fällen kann der Schnelleinrichtungs-Assistent automatisch die richtige Konfiguration ermitteln.

Wenn die schnelle Einrichtung fehlschlägt, müssen Sie manuell ein Konto (für den Empfang von E-Mails) und eine Identität (für den Versand von E-Mails) einrichten. Hierzu benötigen Sie die Adressen der IMAP- und SMTP-Server sowie die jeweiligen Portnummern, ob SSL/TLS oder STARTTLS verwendet werden soll, Ihren Benutzernamen (meistens, aber nicht immer, Ihre E-Mail-Adresse) und Ihr Passwort.

Die Suche nach IMAP und dem Namen des Email-Anbieters reichen im Internet meistens aus, um die richtige Anleitung zu finden.

In einigen Fällen müssen Sie den externen Zugriff auf Ihr Konto gestatten und/oder ein spezielles (App-) Passwort verwenden, wenn beispielsweise eine Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung aktiviert ist.

Zur Autorisierung:

Bitte lesen Sie hier häufige Fehlermeldungen und Lösungen.

Verwandte Fragen:

Wie kann ich …?

Bekannte Probleme

  • Ein Fehler in Android 5.1 und 6 führt dazu, dass Apps manchmal ein falsches Zeitformat anzeigen. Das Ein/Ausschalten des 24-Stunden-Formats in den Android Einstellungen könnte das Problem vorübergehend beheben. Eine vorübergehende Lösung wurde hinzugefügt.
  • Ein Bug in Google Drive bewirkt, dass die nach Google Drive exportierten Dateien leer sind. Google hat dies repariert.
  • Ein Bug in AndroidX lässt FairEmail bei langem Drücken oder Wischen gelegentlich abstürzen. Google hat dies repariert.
  • Ein Fehler im AndroidX ROOM verursacht manchmal einen Absturz mit "… Ausnahme beim Berechnen der Datenbank Live-Daten ... Konnte Zeile ..." nicht lesen. Ein Workaround wurde hinzugefügt.
  • Ein Bug im Android verursacht manchmal einen FairEmail-Absturz mit "... Fehlerhafte Benachrichtigung ..." auf einigen Geräten nach dem Aktualisieren von FairEmail und dem Tippen auf eine Benachrichtigung.
  • Ein Bug in Android verursacht manchmal einen Absturz mit "... ActivityRecord nicht gefunden für ..." nach dem Update von FairEmail. Eine Neuinstallation (quelle) könnte das Problem beheben.
  • Ein Fehler in Android verursacht manchmal einen Absturz mit ... Der Eingabekanal wurde auf einigen Geräten nicht initialisiert ....
  • A bug in LineageOS verursacht manchmal einen Absturz mit ... java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: length=...; index=... ....
  • Ein Fehler in Nova Launcher unter Android 5.x lässt FairEmail mit einem java.lang.StackOverflowError abstürzen, wenn Nova Launcher einen Zugriff auf die Bedienungshilfen hat.
  • Die Ordnerauswahl zeigt manchmal aus noch unbekannten Gründen keine Ordner an. Dies scheint behoben zu sein.
  • Ein Bug in AndroidX macht es schwer, den Schnellscroller zu fassen. Ein Workaround wurde hinzugefügt.
  • Die Verschlüsselung mit YubiKey führt zu einer Endlosschleife. Dies scheint durch einen Fehler in OpenKeychain verursacht zu werden.
  • Der Bildlauf zu einer intern verknüpften Stelle in Originalnachrichten funktioniert nicht. Dies kann nicht behoben werden, da die Original-Nachrichten-Ansicht in einer Scroll-Ansicht enthalten ist.
  • Eine Vorschau eines Nachrichtentextes wird auf Samsung-Uhren nicht (immer) angezeigt, weil setLocalOnly wohl ignoriert wird. Bisher ist nur bekannt, dass Nachrichtenvorschautexte auf den Smart-Armbändern „Pebble 2”, „Fitbit Charge 3” und „Mi Band 3” korrekt angezeigt werden. Siehe auch diese FAQ.
  • Ein Fehler in Android 6.0 verursacht einen Absturz mit * … Ungültiger Offset: ... Der gültige Bereich ist …* wenn Text ausgewählt ist und außerhalb des ausgewählten Textes angetippt wird. Dieser Fehler wurde in Android 6.0.1 behoben.
  • Interne (Anker-)Links funktionieren nicht, da die Originalnachrichten in einer eingebetteten Web-Ansicht in einer scrollenden Ansicht (der Konversationsliste) angezeigt werden. Dies ist eine Einschränkung von Android, die nicht behoben oder umgangen werden kann.

Geplante Funktionen

  • Synchronisieren bei Bedarf (manuell)
  • Halbautomatische Verschlüsselung
  • Nachricht kopieren
  • Farbige Sterne
  • Benachrichtigungseinstellungen pro Ordner
  • Nachrichten zu einem Regel-Treffer anzeigen
  • ManageSieve (es gibt keine gepflegten Java-Bibliotheken mit einer geeigneten Lizenz und ohne Abhängigkeiten und außerdem hat FairEmail eigene Filterregeln)
  • Suche nach Nachrichten mit/ohne Anhänge (dies kann nicht hinzugefügt werden, da IMAP die Suche nach Anhängen nicht unterstützt)
  • Suche nach einem Ordner (das Filtern einer hierarchischen Ordnerliste ist problematisch)
  • Suchvorschläge
  • Autocrypt Setup Message (section 4.4) (Meiner Meinung nach ist es keine gute Idee, einen E-Mail-Client für einen Ausnahmefall sensible Verschlüsselungscodes verarbeiten zu lassen, während OpenKeychain auch Schlüssel exportieren kann)
  • Generische vereinheitlichte Ordner
  • Neue Benachrichtigungszeitpläne für Nachrichten pro Konto (implementiert durch Hinzufügen einer Zeitbedingung zu den Regeln, so dass Nachrichten während ausgewählter Zeiträume zurückgestellt werden können)
  • Kopieren von Konten und Identitäten
  • Pinch zoom (nicht zuverlässig möglich in einer Scroll-Liste; stattdessen kann die gesamte Nachrichtenansicht vergrößert werden)
  • Mehr kompakte Ordneransicht
  • Listen und Tabellen erstellen (dies erfordert einen Rich-Text-Editor, siehe diese FAQ)
  • Pinch Zoom für die Textgröße
  • GIF-Anzeige
  • Themes (ein graues Design mit hellem und dunklem Hintergrund wurden hinzugefügt, weil dies das ist, was die meisten Leute anscheinend wollen)
  • Eine Regel-Bedingung für jeden Tag (ein Tag passt nicht wirklich in die von/zu Datum/Uhrzeit-Bedingung)
  • als Anhang senden
  • Widget für das ausgewählte Konto
  • Erinnerung, um Dateien anzuhängen
  • Domain-Auswahl, für die Bilder gezeigt werden dürfen (dies wird zu kompliziert in der Verwendung)
  • Anzeige markierter Nachrichten (dafür gibt es bereits eine spezielle Suche)
  • Benachrichtigungsaktion verschieben
  • S/MIME-Unterstützung
  • Einstellungen durchsuchen

Alles auf dieser Liste ist in zufälliger Reihenfolge und könnte in naher Zukunft hinzugefügt werden.

Häufig angeforderte Funktionen

Das Design basiert auf vielen Diskussionen und wenn du möchtest, kannst du auch in diesem Forum darüber diskutieren. Ziel des Designs ist es, minimalistisch (keine unnötigen Menüs, Tasten usw.) und nicht ablenkend (keine ausgefallenen Farben, Animationen usw.) zu sein. Alle angezeigten Dinge sollten auf die eine oder andere Weise nützlich sein und sorgfältig positioniert werden, um sie einfach zu bedienen. Schriften, Größen, Farben usw. sollten nach Möglichkeit dem 'Material Design' von Android entsprechen.

Häufig gestellte Fragen

Ich habe eine weitere Frage.

(1) Welche Berechtigungen werden benötigt und warum?

Die folgenden Android-Berechtigungen werden benötigt:

  • *Auf alle Netzwerke zugreifen * (INTERNET): E-Mails senden und empfangen
  • Netzwerkverbindungen abrufen (ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE): Um Änderungen bei der Internetverbindung zu überwachen
  • Beim Start ausführen (RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED): Wird für den automatischen Start der App nach dem Einschalten des Geräts benötigt
  • Vordergrunddienste verwenden (FOREGROUND_SERVICE): um einen Vordergrund-Dienst auf Android 9 Pie und später auszuführen, siehe auch die nächste Frage
  • Ruhezustand deaktivieren (WAKE_LOCK): hält das Gerät wach, während die Nachrichten synchronisiert werden
  • Google Play-Rechnungsdienst (BILLING): Erlaubt In-App-Käufe
  • Optional: Kontakte lesen (READ_CONTACTS): Wird für das automatische Vervollständigen von Adressen und für das Anzeigen von Fotos benötigt
  • Optional: SD-Karteninhalte lesen (READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE): um Dateien von anderen, veralteten Apps anzunehmen, siehe auch diese FAQ
  • Optional: Fingerabdruckhardware nutzen (USE_FINGERPRINT) und biometrische Hardware nutzen (USE_BIOMETRIC): um biometrische Authentifizierung zu verwenden
  • Optional: Konten auf dem Gerät suchen (GET_ACCOUNTS): Um ein Konto auszuwählen, wenn die Gmail Schnelleinrichtung verwendet wird
  • Android 5. Lollipop und vorher: Benutzen Sie Konten auf dem Gerät (USE_CREDENTIALS): Wählen Sie ein Konto bei der Verwendung der Google Mail Schnelleinstellung (nicht für spätere Android-Versionen angefordert)
  • Android 5. Lollipop und vorher: Profil lesen (READ_PROFILE): um deinen Namen bei der Verwendung des Gmail Schnell-Setups zu lesen (nicht für spätere Android-Versionen angefordert)

Optionale Berechtigungen werden nur auf Android 6 Marshmallow und später unterstützt. Bei früheren Android-Versionen werden Sie aufgefordert, die optionalen Berechtigungen für die Installation von FairEmail zu erteilen.

Die folgenden Berechtigungen werden benötigt, um die Anzahl ungelesener Nachrichten auf dem App-Icon anzuzeigen (siehe auch diese FAQ):

  • com.sec.android.provider.badge.permission.READ
  • com.sec.android.provider.badge.permission.WRITE
  • com.htc.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
  • com.htc.launcher.permission.UPDATE_SHORTCUT
  • com.sonyericsson.home.permission.BROADCAST_BADGE
  • com.sonymobile.home.permission.PROVIDER_INSERT_BADGE
  • com.anddoes.launcher.permission.UPDATE_COUNT
  • com.majeur.launcher.permission.UPDATE_BADGE
  • com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.CHANGE_BADGE
  • com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
  • com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS
  • android.permission.READ_APP_BADGE
  • com.oppo.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
  • com.oppo.launcher.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS
  • me.everything.badger.permission.BADGE_COUNT_READ
  • me.everything.badger.permission.BADGE_COUNT_WRITE

FairEmail wird eine Liste der Adressen aufbewahren, von denen Sie Nachrichten erhalten und an die Sie Nachrichten gesendet haben und wird diese Liste für Kontaktvorschläge verwenden, wenn FairEmail keine Berechtigung zum Kontaktzugriff erteilt wurde. Das bedeutet, dass Sie FairEmail ohne den Android-Kontaktanbieter (Adressbuch) verwenden können. Beachten Sie, dass Sie immer noch Kontakte auswählen können, ohne FairEmail Berechtigungen zu erteilen, nur wenn Sie vorschlagen, dass Kontakte ohne Kontaktberechtigungen nicht funktionieren.


(2) Warum wird eine permanente Benachrichtigung angezeigt?

Eine permanente Statusleiste mit niedriger Priorität mit der Anzahl der zu überwachenden Konten und der Anzahl der ausstehenden Operationen (siehe die nächste Frage) wird angezeigt, um zu verhindern, dass Android den Service beendet, der sich um den kontinuierlichen Empfang von E-Mails kümmert. Das war immer notwendig, aber mit der Einführung des Schlummermodus' in Android 6 Marshmallow ist dies nun nicht mehr erforderlich. Der Schlummermodus beendet alle Apps, wenn der Bildschirm für einige Zeit ausgeschaltet ist, es sei denn, die App hat einen Vordergrund-Dienst gestartet, was die Anzeige einer Statusleisten-Benachrichtigung erfordert.

Die meisten, wenn nicht gar alle anderen E-Mail-Apps zeigen keine Benachrichtigungen an, was zu den "Nebeneffekten" führt, dass es keinen oder nur einen verspäteten Hinweis auf neu eingegangene Nachrichten gibt oder ausgehende Nachrichten nicht oder nur verzögert versandt werden.

Android zeigt zuerst Symbole mit hoher Priorität in der Statusleiste an und wird das Symbol der FairEmail Benachrichtigung ausblenden, wenn kein Platz mehr vorhanden ist, um Icons mehr anzuzeigen. In der Praxis bedeutet dies, dass die Benachrichtigung keinen Platz in der Statusleiste belegt, es sei denn, es ist Platz vorhanden.

Die Statusleisten-Benachrichtigung kann über die Benachrichtigungseinstellungen von FairEmail deaktiviert werden:

  • Android 8 Oreo und später: Tippen Sie auf Kanal empfangen und deaktivieren Sie den Kanal über die Android-Einstellungen (dies wird keine neuen Nachrichten deaktivieren)
  • Android 7 Nougat und vorher: aktiviert Hintergrunddienst verwenden, um Nachrichten zu synchronisieren, aber lesen Sie die Bemerkung unter der Einstellung

Sie können in den Empfangseinstellungen zur periodischen Synchronisierung der Nachrichten wechseln, um die Benachrichtigung zu entfernen, aber seien Sie sich bewusst, dass dies mehr Akkuleistung verbrauchen könnte. Sehen Sie hier für weitere Details zum Akkuverbrauch.

Android 8 Oreo könnte auch eine Statusleisten-Benachrichtigung mit dem Text Apps are running in the background zeigen. Bitte sehen Sie hier nach, wie Sie diese Benachrichtigung deaktivieren können.

Einige Leute schlugen vor, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) anstelle eines Android-Dienstes mit einer Statusleistenbenachrichtigung zu verwenden aber dies würde entweder von E-Mail-Providern erfordern, FCM-Nachrichten zu senden oder einen zentralen Server nötig machen, auf dem alle Nachrichten gesammelt werden, der dann die FCM-Nachrichten sendet. Ersteres wird nicht passieren, und letzteres hätte erhebliche Auswirkungen auf die Privatsphäre.

Wenn Sie durch Klicken auf die Benachrichtigung hierher gekommen sind, sollten Sie wissen, dass der nächste Klick den Sammeleingang öffnet.


(3) Was sind Vorgänge und warum sind sie anhängig?

Die Statusleistenbenachrichtigung mit niedriger Priorität zeigt die Anzahl der ausstehenden Operationen, die sein können:

  • Hinzufügen: Nachricht zum Remote-Ordner hinzufügen
  • Verschieben: Nachricht in einen anderen Remote-Ordner verschieben
  • kopieren: Nachricht in einen anderen Remote-Ordner kopieren
  • Abruf: Abruf der geänderten (gedrückten) Nachricht
  • Löschen: Lösche Nachricht aus dem Remote-Ordner
  • Gesehen: Markiere Nachricht als gelesen/ungelesen im Remote-Ordner
  • Beantwortet: Markiere die Nachricht als beantwortet im Remote-Ordner
  • Hinzufügen: Nachricht zum entfernten Ordner hinzufügen
  • Stichwort: IMAP-Markierungen im entfernten Ordner hinzufügen/entfernen
  • Label: Gmail-Label im entfernten Ordner festlegen/zurücksetzen
  • Kopfzeilen: Nachrichtenüberschriften herunterladen
  • Roh: Rohnachricht herunterladen
  • body: Nachrichtentext herunterladen
  • Anhang: Anhang herunterladen
  • Synchronisation: lokale und entfernte Nachrichten synchronisieren
  • Abonnieren: entfernten Ordner abonnieren
  • purge: delete all messages from remote folder
  • Senden: Nachricht senden
  • Existiert: Prüfen, ob Nachricht existiert
  • Regel: Regel im Text ausführen

Operationen werden nur bearbeitet, wenn eine Verbindung zum E-Mail-Server besteht oder manuell synchronisiert wird. Siehe auch diese F&A.


(4) Wie kann ich ein ungültiges Sicherheitszertifikat / leeres Passwort / Klartextverbindung verwenden?

... Nicht vertrauenswürdig ... nicht zertifiziert ...
... Ungültiges Sicherheitszertifikat (Kann die Identität des Servers nicht überprüfen) ...

Kontaktieren Sie Ihren Provider, um dieses Problem zu beheben oder besorgen Sie sich ein gültiges Sicherheitszertifikat, da ungültige und dadurch unsichere Sicherheitszertifikate Man-in-the-Middle-Angriffe ermöglichen. Falls Sie die Kosten hierfür scheuen, dann können Sie kostenlose Sicherheitszertifikate von Let's Encrypt beziehen.

Alternativ Sie können den unten angezeigten Fingerabdruck der Fehlermeldung akzeptieren, wenn Sie das Konto und/oder die Identität in Schritt 1 und 2 einrichten (dies ist nicht möglich, wenn Sie den Schnelleinstellungsassistenten verwenden). Beachten Sie, dass Sie sicherstellen sollten, dass die von Ihnen verwendete Internetverbindung sicher ist.

Beachten Sie, dass ältere Android-Versionen neuere Zertifizierungsbehörden wie Let’s Encrypt möglicherweise nicht akzeptieren, wodurch Internetverbindungen als unsicher eingestuft werden können, siehe auch hier.

Vertrauensanker für Zertifizierungspfad nicht gefunden

... java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Vertrauensanker für Zertifizierungspfad nicht gefunden ... bedeutet, dass der standardmäßige Android Trust Manager die Server-Zertifikatskette nicht überprüfen konnte.

Sie sollten entweder die Serverkonfiguration korrigieren oder den unten angezeigten Fingerabdruck akzeptieren.

Beachten Sie, dass dieses Problem dadurch verursacht werden kann, dass der Server nicht alle Zwischenzertifikate sendet.

Leeres Passwort

Ihr Benutzername ist möglicherweise leicht zu erraten, daher ist dies unsicher.

Klartext-Verbindung

Benutzername und Passwort, sowie alle Nachrichten, werden unverschlüsselt gesendet und empfangen, was im höchsten Maße unsicher ist, weil eine Man-in-the-Middle-Attacke auf einer unverschlüsselten Verbindung sehr einfach ist.

Wenn Sie dennoch ein ungültiges Sicherheitszertifikat, ein leeres Passwort oder eine Klartext-Verbindung verwenden möchten, dann müssen Sie unsichere Verbindungen in den Konto- und/oder Identitätseinstellungen aktivieren. STARTTLS sollte für Klartext-Verbindungen ausgewählt werden. Wenn Sie unsichere Verbindungen aktivieren, sollten Sie sich nur über private, vertrauenswürdige Netzwerke verbinden und niemals über öffentliche Netzwerke, wie sie in Hotels, Flughäfen usw. angeboten werden.


(5) Wie kann ich die Nachrichtenansicht anpassen?

Im Drei-Punkte-Überlaufmenü können Sie die folgenden Optionen aktivieren/deaktivieren bzw. wählen:

  • Textgröße: für drei verschiedene Schriftgrößen
  • kompakte Ansicht: für eine mehr verdichtete Nachrichtendarstellung und eine kleinere Text-Schriftart

Im Anzeigebereich der Einstellungen können Sie ein- oder ausschalten:

  • Einheitlicher Posteingang: Schalten Sie diese Option aus, um stattdessen die Ordner separat aufzulisten, die für den einheitlichen Posteingang ausgewählt wurden
  • Nach Datum gruppieren: Zeigt eine Kopfzeile für alle Nachrichten mit dem gleichen Datum anzeigen
  • Unterhaltungsthread: Fasst zusammengehörige Nachrichten zu einem Gesprächsfaden zusammen. Deaktivieren Sie die Option, um stattdessen einzelne Nachrichten anzuzeigen
  • Kontaktfotos anzeigen: Blendet Kontaktfotos ein oder aus
  • Identicons anzeigen: um generierte Kontaktbilder anzuzeigen
  • Zeige Namen und E-Mail-Adressen: Blendet Anzeigenamen und E-Mail-Adressen ein oder aus
  • Kursiv anzeigen: Lässt den Betreff der Nachricht als kursiven oder normalen Text anzeigen
  • Sterne anzeigen: Sterne ausblenden (Favoriten)
  • Nachrichtenvorschau anzeigen: Zeigt die ersten zwei Zeilen des Nachrichtentextes als Vorschau an
  • Adressdetails als Standard: Erweitert standardmäßig den Adressenbereich
  • Monospace-Schriftart für Nachrichtentext: Aktivieren Sie die Option, um eine Schriftart mit fester Breite für Nachrichtentexte zu verwenden
  • Originalnachrichten von bekannten Kontakten anzeigen: Wenn Sie Originalnachrichten von bekannten Kontakten automatisch anzeigen lassen möchten, dann lesen Sie bitte diese FAQ
  • Bilder von bekannten Kontakten anzeigen: Wenn Sie Bilder von bekannten Kontakten automatisch anzeigen lassen möchten, dann lesen Sie bitte diese FAQ
  • Konversations-Aktionsleiste: Blendet die untere Navigationsleiste ein oder aus

Beachten Sie, dass Nachrichten nur angezeigt werden können, wenn der Nachrichtentext heruntergeladen wurde. Größere Nachrichtentexte werden standardmäßig nicht bei getakteten Datenverbindungen (Mobile Daten) heruntergeladen. Sie können dies in den Einstellungen ändern.

Wenn die Liste der Adressaten sehr lang ist, dann können Sie den Adressbereich mit dem Weniger Symbol oben im Adressbereich einklappen.

Einige Benutzer fragten:

  • wie man den Betreff fett anzeigen lassen kann, obwohl eine fette Schrift bereits verwendet wird, um ungelesene Nachrichten hervorzuheben
  • wie man die Adresse oder den Betreff unabhängig von der Textgröße-Option in den Einstellungen größer/kleiner anzeigen lassen kann
  • um den Stern nach links zu bewegen, aber es ist viel einfacher, den Stern auf der rechten Seite zu bedienen

Leider ist es unmöglich, alle glücklich zu machen und viele Einstellungen wären nicht nur verwirrend, sondern auch nie ausreichend.


(6) Wie kann ich mich bei Gmail / G Suite anmelden?

Sie können den Schnelleinrichtungsassistenten verwenden, um einfach ein Gmail-Konto und eine Gmail-Identität einzurichten.

Wenn Sie kein Gmail-Konto auf dem Gerät verwenden möchten, können Sie entweder den Zugriff für „weniger sichere Apps“ aktivieren und Ihr Kontopasswort verwenden (nicht empfohlen) oder die Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung aktivieren und ein appspezifisches Passwort verwenden. Um ein Passwort zu verwenden, müssen Sie Konto und Identität über die Einrichtungsschritte 1 und 2 statt über den Schnelleinrichtungs-Assistenten einrichten.

Bitte lesen Sie in dieser FAQ, warum nur On-Device-Konten verwendet werden können.

Beachten Sie, dass bei Aktivierung der Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung ein app-spezifisches Passwort erforderlich ist.


Appspezifisches Passwort

Wie ein appspezifisches Passwort erstellt wird, sehen Sie hier.


„Weniger sichere Apps“ aktivieren

Wichtig: Die Verwendung dieser Methode wird nicht empfohlen, da sie weniger zuverlässig ist.

Wichtig: Gsuite-Konten, die mit einem Benutzernamen/Passwort autorisiert sind, funktionieren in naher Zukunft nicht mehr.

Sehen Sie hier wie man „weniger sichere Apps“ aktiviert oder gehen Sie direkt zu der Einstellung.

Wenn Sie mehrere Gmail-Konten verwenden, stellen Sie sicher, dass Sie die Einstellung „weniger sichere Apps“ des/der richtigen Accounts ändern.

Seien Sie sich bewusst, dass Sie den „weniger sicheren Apps“ Bildschirm über den Zurückpfeil verlassen müssen, um die Einstellung anzuwenden.

Wenn Sie diese Methode verwenden, sollten Sie ein starkes Passwort für Ihr Gmail-Konto verwendet, was aber grundsätzlich immer eine gute Idee ist. Beachten Sie, dass die Verwendung des Standard-IMAP-Protokolls an sich nicht weniger sicher ist.

Wenn „weniger sichere Anwendungen” nicht aktiviert ist, erhalten Sie die Fehlermeldung Authentifizierung fehlgeschlagen - ungültige Anmeldedaten für Konten (IMAP) und Benutzername und Passwort nicht akzeptiert für Identitäten (SMTP).


Allgemein

Möglicherweise erhalten Sie die Meldung „Bitte melden Sie sich über Ihren Webbrowser an”. Dies geschieht, wenn Google das Netzwerk, das Sie mit dem Internet verbindet (dies könnte ein VPN sein), als unsicher einstuft. Dies kann verhindert werden, indem Sie den Assistenten zur schnellen Einrichtung von Google Mail oder ein app-spezifisches Passwort verwenden.

Siehe hier für eine Anleitung von Google und hier für die Problemlösung.


(7) Warum werden gesendete Nachrichten nicht (direkt) im gesendeten Ordner angezeigt?

Gesendete Nachrichten werden normalerweise aus dem Postausgang in den Ordner „Gesendet” verschoben, sobald Ihr Provider gesendete Nachrichten dem Ordner „Gesendet” hinzufügt. Dazu muss in den Kontoeinstellungen einen Ordner "Gesendet" ausgewählt werden, und dieser Ordner zum Synchronisieren festgelegt werden.

Einige Provider verfolgen die gesendeten Nachrichten nicht oder der verwendete SMTP-Server ist möglicherweise nicht mit dem Provider verbunden. In diesen Fällen fügt FairEmail gesendete Nachrichten automatisch bei der Synchronisation des Ordners „Gesendet” dem Ordner „Gesendet” hinzu. Beachten Sie, dass dies zu zusätzlichem Internetverkehr führt.

~~Wenn dies nicht geschieht, verfolgt Ihr Provider möglicherweise nicht die gesendeten Nachrichten oder Sie verwenden einen SMTP-Server, der dem Provider nicht zugeordnet ist. ~ ~~In diesen Fällen können Sie die erweiterte Identitätseinstellung Speichere gesendete Nachrichten aktivieren, damit FairEmail gesendete Nachrichten direkt nach dem Senden einer Nachricht in den gesendeten Ordner einfügen kann. ~ ~~Beachten Sie, dass das Aktivieren dieser Einstellung zu doppelten Nachrichten führen kann, wenn Ihr Provider auch gesendete Nachrichten in den gesendeten Ordner einfügt. ~ Beachten Sie auch, dass das Aktivieren dieser Einstellung zusätzliche Datenauslastung zur Folge hat, insbesondere wenn Nachrichten mit großen Anhängen gesendet werden.

If sent messages in the outbox are not found in the sent folder on a full synchronize, they will be moved from the outbox to the sent folder too. A full synchronize happens when reconnecting to the server or when synchronizing periodically or manually. You'll likely want to enable the advanced setting Store sent messages instead to move messages to the sent folder sooner.


(8) Kann ich ein Microsoft Exchange-Konto verwenden?

Sie können ein Microsoft Exchange-Konto verwenden, wenn es über IMAP zugänglich ist, was meistens der Fall ist. Sehen Sie hier für weitere Informationen.

Hier finden Sie Microsofts Dokumentation zur Konfiguration eines E-Mail-Clients. Es gibt auch einen Abschnitt über häufige Verbindungsfehler und -lösungen.

Einige ältere Exchange-Server-Versionen haben einen Fehler, der eine leere Nachricht und beschädigte Anhänge verursacht. Eine Problemumgehung finden Sie in dieser FAQ.

Siehe diese FAQ zur ActiveSync Unterstützung.

Siehe diese FAQ zu OAuth Support.


(9) Was sind Identitäten / wie füge ich einen Alias hinzu?

Identitäten stellen E-Mail-Adressen dar, von denen Sie über einen E-Mail (SMTP) Server senden.

Einige Anbieter gestatten die Verwendung mehrerer Aliasse. You can configure these by setting the email address field of an additional identity to the alias address and setting the user name field to your main email address.

Beachten Sie, dass Sie eine Identität durch langes Drücken kopieren können.

Alternativ können Sie in den erweiterten Einstellungen einer existierenden Identität das Bearbeiten der Absenderadresse erlauben, um den Benutzernamen beim Erstellen einer Nachricht zu bearbeiten, wenn Ihr Provider dies zulässt.

FairEmail aktualisiert automatisch die Passwörter der jeweiligen Identitäten, wenn Sie das Passwort des zugehörigen Kontos oder einer damit verbundenen Identität aktualisieren.

Bitte diese F&A zum Bearbeiten des Benutzernamens von E-Mail-Adressen beachten.


(10) What does 'UIDPLUS not supported' mean?

The error message UIDPLUS not supported means that your email provider does not provide the IMAP UIDPLUS extension. This IMAP extension is required to implement two way synchronization, which is not an optional feature. Wenn Ihr Anbieter diese Erweiterung nicht aktivieren kann, können Sie FairEmail nicht für diesen Anbieter verwenden.


(11) Warum wird POP nicht unterstützt?

Besides that any decent email provider supports IMAP these days, using POP will result in unnecessary extra battery usage and delayed new message notifications. Moreover, POP is unsuitable for two way synchronization and more often than not people read and write messages on different devices these days.

Basically, POP supports only downloading and deleting messages from the inbox. So, common operations like setting message attributes (read, starred, answered, etc), adding (backing up) and moving messages is not possible.

See also what Google writes about it.

For example Gmail can import messages from another POP account, which can be used as a workaround for when your provider doesn't support IMAP.

tl;dr; consider to switch to IMAP.


(12) How does encryption/decryption work?

Allgemein

Please see here about how public/private key encryption works.

Encryption in short:

  • Ausgehende Nachrichten werden mit dem öffentlichen Schlüssel des Empfängers verschlüsselt
  • Eingehende Nachrichten werden mit dem privaten Schlüssel des Empfängers entschlüsselt

Signing in short:

  • Ausgehende Nachrichten sind mit dem privaten Schlüssel des Absenders signiert
  • Eingehende Nachrichten werden mit dem öffentlichen Schlüssel des Absenders überprüft

To sign/encrypt a message, just select the appropriate method in the send dialog. You can always open the send dialog using the three-dots overflow menu in case you selected Don't show again before.

To verify a signature or to decrypt a received message, open the message and just tap the gesture or padlock icon just below the message action bar.

The first time you send a signed/encrypted message you might be asked for a sign key. FairEmail will automatically store the selected sign key in the used identity for the next time. If you need to reset the sign key, just save the identity or long press the identity in the list of identities and select Reset sign key. The selected sign key is visible in the list of identities. If need to select a key on a case by case basis, you can create multiple identities for the same account with the same email address.

In the privacy settings you can select the default encryption method (PGP or S/MIME), enable Sign by default, Encrypt by default and Automatically decrypt messages, but be aware that automatic decryption is not possible if user interaction is required, like selecting a key or reading a security token.

The to be encrypted message text/attachments and the decrypted message text/attachments are stored locally only and will never be added to the remote server. If you want to undo decryption, you can use the resync menu item in the three-dots menu of the message action bar.

PGP

You'll need to install and configure OpenKeychain first. FairEmail was tested with OpenKeychain version 5.4. Later versions will most likely be compatible, but earlier versions might not be.

Important: the OpenKeychain app is known to (silently) crash when the calling app (FairEmail) is not authorized yet and is getting an existing public key. You can workaround this by trying to send a signed/encrypted message to a sender with an unknown public key.

Important: if the OpenKeychain app cannot find a key (anymore), you might need to reset a previously selected key. This can be done by long pressing an identity in the list of identities (Setup, step 2, Manage).

Important: to let apps like FairEmail reliably connect to the OpenKeychain service to encrypt/decrypt messages, it might be necessary to disable battery optimizations for the OpenKeychain app.

Important: the OpenKeychain app reportedly needs contacts permission to work correctly.

Important: on some Android versions / devices it is necessary to enable Show popups while running in background in the additional permissions of the Android app settings of the OpenKeychain app. Without this permission the draft will be saved, but the OpenKeychain popup to confirm/select might not appear.

FairEmail will send the Autocrypt header for use by other email clients, but only for signed and encrypted messages because too many email servers have problems with the often long Autocrypt header. Note that the most secure way to start an encrypted email exchange is by sending signed messages first. Received Autocrypt headers will be sent to the OpenKeychain app for storage on verifying a signature or decrypting a message.

All key handling is delegated to the OpenKey chain app for security reasons. This also means that FairEmail does not store PGP keys.

Inline encrypted PGP in received messages is supported, but inline PGP signatures and inline PGP in outgoing messages is not supported, see here about why not.

Signed-only or encrypted-only messages are not a good idea, please see here about why not:

Signed-only messages are supported, encrypted-only messages are not supported.

Common errors:

  • Kein Schlüssel: kein PGP-Schlüssel für eine der aufgeführten E-Mail-Adressen verfügbar
  • Verschlüsselungsschlüssel fehlt: es wurde wahrscheinlich in FairEmail ein Schlüssel ausgewählt, der in der OpenKeychain-App nicht mehr vorhanden ist. Das Zurücksetzen des Schlüssels (siehe oben) wird dieses Problem eventuell beheben.

S/MIME

Encrypting a message requires the public key(s) of the recipient(s). Signing a message requires your private key.

Private keys are stored by Android and can be imported via the Android advanced security settings. There is a shortcut (button) for this in the privacy settings. Android will ask you to set a PIN, pattern, or password if you didn't before. If you have a Nokia device with Android 9, please read this first.

Note that certificates can contains multiple keys for multiple purposes, for example for authentication, encryption and signing. Android only imports the first key, so to import all the keys, the certificate must first be split. This is not very trivial and you are advised to ask the certificate supplier for support.

Beachten Sie, dass S/MIME-Signierung mit anderen Algorithmen als RSA zwar unterstützt wird, aber andere E-Mail-Clients dies möglicherweise nicht unterstützen. S/MIME-Verschlüsselung ist nur mit symmetrischen Algorithmen möglich, das heißt in der Praxis RSA.

Die Standard-Verschlüsselungsmethode ist PGP, aber die zuletzt verwendete Verschlüsselungsmethode wird fürs nächsten Mal für die ausgewählte Identität gespeichert. Möglicherweise müssen Sie die Sendeoptionen im Drei-Punkte-Menü erneut aktivieren, um die Verschlüsselungsmethode wählen zu können.

Um verschiedene private Schlüssel für die gleiche E-Mail-Adresse zu erlauben lässt FairEmail Sie immer einen Schlüssel auswählen, wenn es mehrere Identitäten mit der gleichen E-Mail-Adresse für denselben Account gibt.

Öffentliche Schlüssel werden bei FairEmail gespeichert und können bei der erstmaligen Überprüfung einer Signatur oder über die Privatsphäre-Einstellungen (PEM oder DER Format) importiert werden.

FairEmail überprüft sowohl die Unterschrift als auch die gesamte Zertifikatskette.

Häufige Fehler:

  • No certificate found matching targetContraints: this likely means you are using an old version of FairEmail
  • unable to find valid certification path to requested target: basically this means one or more intermediate or root certificates were not found
  • Privater Schlüssel stimmt mit keinem Verschlüsselungsschlüssel überein: Der ausgewählte Schlüssel kann nicht verwendet werden, um die Nachricht zu entschlüsseln, wahrscheinlich weil es der falsche Schlüssel ist
  • Kein privater Schlüssel: Es wurde kein Zertifikat ausgewählt oder kein Zertifikat im Android-Schlüsselgeschäft verfügbar

Falls die Zertifikatskette falsch ist, können Sie auf den kleinen Info-Button klicken, um alle Zertifikate anzuzeigen. After the certificate details the issuer or "selfSign" is shown. Ein Zertifikat ist selbstsigniert, wenn der Betreff und der Emittent identisch sind. Certificates from a certificate authority (CA) are marked with "keyCertSign". Zertifikate im Android-Schlüsselspeicher werden mit »Android« gekennzeichnet.

Eine gültige Kette sieht so aus:

Your certificate > zero or more intermediate certificates > CA (root) certificate marked with "Android"

Note that a certificate chain will always be invalid when no anchor certificate can be found in the Android key store, which is fundamental to S/MIME certificate validation.

Sehen Sie hier, wie Sie Zertifikate in den Android-Schlüsselspeicher importieren können.

Die Verwendung von abgelaufenen Schlüsseln, inline­verschlüsselten oder -signierten Nachrichten und Hardware­sicherheitstoken wird nicht unterstützt.

Wenn Sie ein kostenloses (Test) S/MIME Zertifikat suchen, finden Sie die Optionen hier. Achten sie darauf, das zuerst zu lesen, wenn sie ein solches Zertifikat erhalten wollen.

Wie man einen öffentlichen Schlüssel aus einem S/MIME-Zertifikat extrahiert:

openssl pkcs12 -in filename.pfx/p12 -clcerts -nokeys -out cert.pem

Sie können S/MIME Signaturen dekodieren usw., siehe hier.

S/MIME signieren/verschlüsseln ist ein Pro-Funktion, aber alle anderen PGP- und S/MIME-Operationen sind frei nutzbar.


(13) Wie funktioniert die Suche auf dem Gerät bzw. auf den Servern?

Sie können Nachrichten nach Absender (von), Empfänger (to, cc, bcc), Betreff, Schlagwörtern oder Nachrichtentext mit Hilfe der Lupe in der Aktionsleiste eines Ordners suchen. Sie können auch von jeder App aus suchen, indem Sie FairEmail Suche im Popup-Menü kopieren/einfügen auswählen.

Die Suche im Sammeleingang wird alle Ordner aller Konten durchsuchen, die Suche in der Ordnerliste wird nur in dem zugehörigen Konto suchen, und die Suche in einem Ordner wird nur in diesem Ordner durchsuchen.

Nachrichten werden zuerst nur auf dem Gerät gesucht. Es gibt einen Nochmal-Suchen-Aktionsknopf am unteren Bildschirmrand, um die Suche auf dem Server fortzusetzen. Sie können auswählen, in welchem Ordner die Suche fortgesetzt werden soll.

Das IMAP-Protokoll unterstützt nicht die gleichzeitige Suche in mehr als einem Ordner. Die Suche auf dem Server ist ein aufwendiger Vorgang, daher ist es nicht möglich, mehrere Ordner auszuwählen.

Die Suche nach lokalen Nachrichten ist unabhängig von Groß- und Kleinschreibung und auf Teiltext bezoge. Der Nachrichtentext lokaler Nachrichten wird nicht durchsucht, wenn der Nachrichtentext noch nicht heruntergeladen wurde. Die Suche auf dem Server kann je nach Anbieter Groß- und Kleinschreibung berücksichtigen oder ignorieren, nach Teiltext oder nur nach ganzen Wörtern suchen.

Einige Server schaffen es nicht den Nachrichtentext zu durchsuchen, wenn es viele Nachrichten gibt. Für diesen Fall gibt es eine Option, um die Suche im Nachrichtentext zu deaktivieren.

Es ist möglich, Gmail-Suchoperatoren zu verwenden, indem einem Suchbefehl die Präfix raw: vorangestellt wird. Wenn Sie nur ein Gmail-Konto konfiguriert haben, können Sie eine rohe Suche direkt auf dem Server starten, indem Sie vom Sammeleingang aus suchen. Wenn Sie mehrere Gmail-Konten konfiguriert haben, müssen sie zuerst zur Ordnerliste oder zum Archiv („Alle Nachrichten“) des Gmail-Kontos navigieren, in dem Sie suchen möchten. Die möglichen Suchoperatoren finden Sie hier. Zum Beispiel:

raw:larger:10M

Die Suche durch eine große Anzahl von Nachrichten auf dem Gerät ist aufgrund von zwei Einschränkungen nicht sehr schnell:

  • sqlite, die Datenbank-Engine von Android hat ein Datensatzgrößenlimit und verhindert, dass Nachrichten in der Datenbank gespeichert werden
  • Android-Apps können nur mit limitiertem Arbeitsspeicher arbeiten, auch wenn das Gerät viel Speicher zur Verfügung hat

This means that searching for a message text requires that files containing the message texts need to be opened one by one to check if the searched text is contained in the file, which is a relatively expensive process.

In the miscellaneous settings you can enable Build search index to significantly increase the speed of searching on the device, but be aware that this will increase battery and storage space usage. The search index is based on words, so searching for partial text is not possible. Searching using the search index is by default AND, so searching for apple orange will search for apple AND orange. Words separated by commas result in searching for OR, so for example apple, orange will search for apple OR orange. Both can be combined, so searching for apple, orange banana will search for apple OR (orange AND banana). Using the search index is a pro feature.

From version 1.1315 it is possible to use search expressions like this:

Apfel +Banane -Kirsche ?Nüsse

This will result in searching like this:

(»Apfel« UND »Banane« UND NICHT »Kirsche«) ODER »Nüsse«

Search expressions can be used for searching on the device via the search index and for searching on the email server, but not for searching on the device without search index for performance reasons.

Searching on the device is a free feature, using the search index and searching on the server is a pro feature.


(14) How can I set up an Outlook / Live / Hotmail account?

An Outlook / Live / Hotmail account can be set up via the quick setup wizard and selecting Outlook.

To use an Outlook, Live or Hotmail account with two factor authentication enabled, you need to create an app password. See here for the details.

See here for Microsoft's instructions.

Um ein Office-365-Konto einzurichten, lesen Sie bitte diese F&A.


(15) Why does the message text keep loading?

The message header and message body are fetched separately from the server. The message text of larger messages is not being pre-fetched on metered connections and need to be fetched on opening the message. The message text will keep loading if there is no connection to the account, see also the next question.

Sie können in der Konten- und Ordnerliste den Konten- und Ordnerstatus überprüfen (siehe Legende für die Bedeutung der Symbole). In der über das Hauptnavigationsmenü erreichbare Liste sehen Sie ausstehende Operationen (siehe diese F&A für die Bedeutung der Operationen).

In the receive settings you can set the maximum size for automatically downloading of messages on metered connections.

Mobile connections are almost always metered and some (paid) Wi-Fi hotspots are too.


(16) Warum werden Nachrichten nicht synchronisiert?

Mögliche Ursachen dafür, dass Nachrichten nicht synchronisiert (gesendet oder empfangen) werden, sind:

  • Konto oder Ordner(e) sind nicht zum Synchronisieren gesetzt
  • Die Anzahl der Tage, für die die Nachricht synchronisiert werden soll, ist zu niedrig gesetzt
  • Keine Internetverbindung
  • Der E-Mail-Server ist vorübergehend nicht verfügbar
  • Android hat die Synchronisation gestoppt

Überprüfen Sie also Ihre Konto- und Ordnereinstellungen und überprüfen Sie, ob die Konten/Ordner verbunden sind (siehe die Legende in der Navigation zur Bedeutung der Symbole).

Wenn es irgendwelche Fehlermeldungen gibt, lesen Sie bitte diese FAQ.

Auf einigen Geräten, wo es viele Anwendungen gibt, die um Speicher konkurrieren, kann Android den Synchronisierungsdienst als letzte Möglichkeit stoppen.

Einige Android-Versionen stoppen Apps und Dienste zu aggressiv. Siehe diese spezielle Webseite und dieses Android-Problem für weitere Informationen.

Disabling battery optimizations (setup step 4) reduces the chance Android will stop the synchronization service.


(17) Why does manual synchronize not work?

If the Synchronize now menu is dimmed, there is no connection to the account.

See the previous question for more information.


(18) Why is the message preview not always shown?

The preview of the message text cannot be shown if the message body has not been downloaded yet. Siehe auch diese F&A.


(19) Warum sind die Pro-Funktionen so teuer?

Die richtige Frage ist: "Warum gibt es so viele Steuern und Gebühren?":

  • MwSt.: 25 % (je nach Land)
  • Google-Gebühr: 30 %
  • Einkommenssteuer: 50 %
  • PayPal-Gebühr: 5-10 % abhängig vom Land/Betrag

Was also für den Entwickler übrig bleibt, ist nur ein Bruchteil dessen, was Sie bezahlen.

Note that only some convenience and advanced features need to be purchased which means that FairEmail is basically free to use.

Also note that most free apps will appear not to be sustainable in the end, whereas FairEmail is properly maintained and supported, and that free apps may have a catch, like sending privacy sensitive information to the internet.

I have been working on FairEmail almost every day for more than two years, so I think the price is more than reasonable. For this reason there won't be discounts either.


(20) Can I get a refund?

If a purchased pro feature doesn't work as intended and this isn't caused by a problem in the free features and I cannot fix the problem in a timely manner, you can get a refund. In all other cases there is no refund possible. In no circumstances there is a refund possible for any problem related to the free features, since there wasn't paid anything for them and because they can be evaluated without any limitation. I take my responsibility as seller to deliver what has been promised and I expect that you take responsibility for informing yourself of what you are buying.

(21) How do I enable the notification light?

Before Android 8 Oreo: there is an advanced option in the setup for this.

Android 8 Oreo and later: see here about how to configure notification channels. You can use the button Manage notifications in the setup to directly go to the Android notification settings. Note that apps cannot change notification settings, including the notification light setting, on Android 8 Oreo and later anymore. Apps designed and targeting older Android versions might still be able to control the contents of notifications, but such apps cannot be updated anymore and recent Android versions will show a warning that such apps are outdated.

Sometimes it is necessary to disable the setting Show message preview in notifications or to enable the settings Show notifications with a preview text only to workaround a bug in Android. This might apply to notification sounds and vibrations too.

Setting a light color before Android 8 is not supported and on Android 8 and later not possible.


(22) What does account/folder error ... mean?

FairEmail does not hide errors like similar apps often do, so it is easier to diagnose problems.

FairEmail will automatically try to connect again after a delay. This delay will be doubled after each failed attempt to prevent draining the battery and to prevent from being locked out permanently.

There are general errors and errors specific to Gmail accounts (see below).

General errors

The error ... Authentication failed ... or ... AUTHENTICATE failed ... likely means that your username or password was incorrect. Some providers expect as username just username and others your full email address username@example.com. When copying/pasting to enter a username or password, invisible characters might be copied, which could cause this problem as well. Some password managers are known to do this incorrectly too. The username might be case sensitive, so try lowercase characters only. The password is almost always case sensitive. Some providers require using an app password instead of the account password, so please check the documentation of the provider. Sometimes it is necessary to enable external access (IMAP/SMTP) on the website of the provider first. Other possible causes are that the account is blocked or that logging in has been administratively restricted in some way, for example by allowing to login from certain networks / IP addresses only.

The error ... Too many bad auth attempts ... likely means that you are using a Yahoo account password instead of an app password. Siehe in dieser F&A, wie man ein Yahoo-Konto einrichtet.

The message ... +OK ... likely means that a POP3 port (usually port number 995) is being used for an IMAP account (usually port number 993).

The errors ... invalid greeting ..., ... requires valid address ... and ... Parameter to HELO does not conform to RFC syntax ... can likely be solved by changing the advanced identity setting Use local IP address instead of host name.

The errors ... Couldn't connect to host ..., ... Connection refused ... or ... Network unreachable ... mean that FairEmail was not able to connect to the email server.

Der Fehler ... Host is unresolved ... or "... Unable to resolve host ... means that the address of the email server could not be resolved. This might be caused by ad blocking or an unreachable or not properly working DNS server.

The error ... Software caused connection abort ... means that the email server or something between FairEmail and the email server actively terminated an existing connection. This can for example happen when connectivity was abruptly lost. A typical example is turning on flight mode.

The errors ... BYE Logging out ..., ... Connection reset by peer ... mean that the email server actively terminated an existing connection.

The error ... Connection closed by peer ... might be caused by a not updated Exchange server, see here for more information.

The errors ... Read error ..., ... Write error ..., ... Read timed out ..., ... Broken pipe ... mean that the email server is not responding anymore or that the internet connection is bad.

The error ... Unexpected end of zlib input stream ... means that not all data was received, possibly due to a bad or interrupted connection.

The error ... connection failure ... could indicate Too many simultaneous connections.

The warning ... Unsupported encoding ... means that the character set of the message is unknown or not supported. FairEmail will assume ISO-8859-1 (Latin1), which will in most cases result in showing the message correctly.

Bitte sehen Sie hier nach den Fehlern ... Untrusted ... not in certificate ..., ... Invalid security certificate (Can't verify identity of server) ... or ... Trust anchor for certification path not found ...

Bitte sehen Sie hier nach dem Fehler ... Syntactically invalid HELO argument(s) ....

Bitte sehen Sie hier nach dem Fehler ... Handshake failed ....

See here for what error codes like EHOSTUNREACH and ETIMEDOUT mean.

Possible causes are:

  • Eine Firewall oder ein Router blockiert Verbindungen zum Server
  • Hostname oder Portnummer ist ungültig
  • Es gibt Probleme mit der Internetverbindung
  • Es gibt Probleme bei der Auflösung von Domainnamen (Yandex: versuchen Sie, privates DNS in den Android-Einstellungen zu deaktivieren)
  • Der E-Mail-Server lehnt die Annahme von (externen) Verbindungen ab
  • Der E-Mail-Server lehnt die Annahme einer Nachricht ab, zum Beispiel weil sie zu groß ist oder unzulässige Links enthält
  • Es gibt zu viele Verbindungen zum Server, siehe dazu auch die nächste Frage

Many public Wi-Fi networks block outgoing email to prevent spam. Sometimes you can workaround this by using another SMTP port. See the documentation of the provider for the usable port numbers.

If you are using a VPN, the VPN provider might block the connection because it is too aggressively trying to prevent spam. Note that Google Fi is using a VPN too.

Send errors

SMTP servers can reject messages for a variety of reasons. Too large messages and triggering the spam filter of an email server are the most common reasons.

  • Die Größe von Anhängen für Google Mail beträgt 25 MB
  • Das Limit für die Größe von Anhängen für Outlook und Office 365 beträgt 20 MB
  • Das Limit für die Größe von Anhängen für Yahoo beträgt 25 MB
  • 554 5.7.1 Service nicht verfügbar; Client Host xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx blockiert, bitte hier schauen
  • 501 Syntaxfehler — Zeile zu lang wird oft durch die Verwendung von langen Autocrypt-Kopfzeilen verursacht
  • 503 5.5.0 Recipient already specified mostly means that an address is being used both as TO and CC address

Gmail errors

The authorization of Gmail accounts setup with the quick wizard needs to be periodically refreshed via the Android account manager. This requires contact/account permissions and internet connectivity.

The error ... Authentifizierung fehlgeschlagen ... Account not found ... means that a previously authorized Gmail account was removed from the device.

The errors ... Authentication failed ... No token on refresh ... means that the Android account manager failed to refresh the authorization of a Gmail account.

The error ... Authentication failed ... Invalid credentials ... network error ... means that the Android account manager was not able to refresh the authorization of a Gmail account due to problems with the internet connection

The error ... Authentication failed ... Invalid credentials ... could be caused by having revoked the required account/contacts permissions. Just start the wizard (but do not select an account) to grant the required permissions again.

The eror ... ServiceDisabled ... might be caused by enrolling in the Advanced Protection Program: "To read your email, you can (must) use Gmail - You won’t be able to use your Google Account with some (all) apps & services that require access to sensitive data like your emails", see here.

When in doubt, you can ask for support.


(23) Why do I get alert ... ?

General

Alerts are warning messages sent by email servers.

Too many simultaneous connections or Maximum number of connections exceeded

This alert will be sent when there are too many folder connections for the same email account at the same time.

Possible causes are:

  • Es sind mehrere E-Mail-Clients mit demselben Konto verbunden
  • Der gleiche E-Mail-Client ist mehrfach mit demselben Konto verbunden
  • Frühere Verbindungen wurden abrupt abgebrochen, zum Beispiel durch den plötzlichen Verlust der Internetverbindung

First try to wait some time to see if the problem resolves itself, else:

  • entweder wechseln Sie regelmäßig auf Nachrichten in den Empfangseinstellungen um, was dazu führt, dass Ordner gleichzeitig geöffnet werden
  • oder setzen Sie Ordner, die statt der Synchronisierung abgefragt werden sollen (lange halten Sie den Ordner in der Ordnerliste, bearbeiten Sie die Eigenschaften)

The maximum number of simultaneous folder connections for Gmail is 15, so you can synchronize at most 15 folders simultaneously on all your devices at the same time. For this reason Gmail user folders are set to poll by default instead of synchronize always. When needed or desired, you can change this by long pressing a folder in the folder list and selecting Edit properties. See here for details.

When using a Dovecot server, you might want to change the setting mail_max_userip_connections.


(24) What is browse messages on the server?

Browse messages on the server will fetch messages from the email server in real time when you reach the end of the list of synchronized messages, even when the folder is set to not synchronize. You can disable this feature in the advanced account settings.


(25) Why can't I select/open/save an image, attachment or a file?

When a menu item to select/open/save a file is disabled (dimmed) or when you get the message Storage access framework not available, the storage access framework, a standard Android component, is probably not present. This might be because your custom ROM does not include it or because it was actively removed (debloated).

FairEmail does not request storage permissions, so this framework is required to select files and folders. No app, except maybe file managers, targeting Android 4.4 KitKat or later should ask for storage permissions because it would allow access to all files.

The storage access framework is provided by the package com.android.documentsui, which is visible as Files app on some Android versions (notable OxygenOS).

You can enable the storage access framework (again) with this adb command:

pm install -k --user 0 com.android.documentsui

Alternatively, you might be able to enable the Files app again using the Android app settings.


(26) Can I help to translate FairEmail in my own language?

Yes, you can translate the texts of FairEmail in your own language on Crowdin. Registration is free.

If you would like your name or alias to be included in the list of contributors in About the app, please contact me.


(27) How can I distinguish between embedded and external images?

External image:

External image

Embedded image:

Embedded image

Broken image:

Broken image

Note that downloading external images from a remote server can be used to record you did see a message, which you likely don't want if the message is spam or malicious.


(28) How can I manage status bar notifications?

In the setup you'll find a button Manage notifications to directly navigate to the Android notifications settings for FairEmail.

On Android 8.0 Oreo and later you can manage the properties of the individual notification channels, for example to set a specific notification sound or to show notifications on the lock screen.

FairEmail has the following notification channels:

  • Dienst: Wird für die Benachrichtigung des Synchronisationsdienstes verwendet, siehe auch diese FAQ
  • Senden: Wird für die Benachrichtigung des Sendedienstes verwendet
  • Benachrichtigungen: Wird für neue Nachrichten verwendet
  • Warnung: Für Warnhinweise verwendet
  • Fehler: Wird für Fehlerbenachrichtigungen verwendet

See here for details on notification channels. In short: tap on the notification channel name to access the channel settings.

On Android before Android 8 Oreo you can set the notification sound in the settings.

Sehen Sie sich diese F&A an, wenn Ihr Gerät ein Benachrichtigungslicht hat.


(29) How can I get new message notifications for other folders?

Just long press a folder, select Edit properties, and enable either Show in unified inbox or Notify new messages (available on Android 7 Nougat and later only) and tap Save.


(30) How can I use the provided quick settings?

There are quick settings (settings tiles) available to:

  • global die Synchronisierung aktivieren/deaktivieren
  • zeige die Anzahl neuer Nachrichten und markiere sie als gesehen (nicht gelesen)

Quick settings require Android 7.0 Nougat or later. The usage of settings tiles is explained here.


(31) How can I use the provided shortcuts?

There are shortcuts available to:

  • eine neue Nachricht an einen Favoriten schreiben
  • Konten, Identitäten usw einrichten.

Shortcuts require Android 7.1 Nougat or later. The usage of shortcuts is explained here.


(32) How can I check if reading email is really safe?

You can use the Email Privacy Tester for this.


(33) Why are edited sender addresses not working?

Most providers accept validated addresses only when sending messages to prevent spam.

For example Google modifies the message headers like this for unverified addresses:

Von: Jemand <somebody@example.org>
X-Google-Original-Von: Jemand <somebody+extra@example.org>

This means that the edited sender address was automatically replaced by a verified address before sending the message.

Note that this is independent of receiving messages.


(34) How are identities matched?

Identities are as expected matched by account. For incoming messages the to, cc, bcc, from and (X-)delivered/envelope/original-to addresses will be checked (in this order) and for outgoing messages (drafts, outbox and sent) only the from addresses will be checked.

The matched address will be shown as via in the addresses section of received messages (between the message header and message text).

Note that identities needs to be enabled to be able to be matched and that identities of other accounts will not be considered.

Matching will be done only once on receiving a message, so changing the configuration will not change existing messages. You could clear local messages by long pressing a folder in the folder list and synchronize the messages again though.

It is possible to configure a regex in the identity settings to match the username of an email address (the part before the @ sign).

Note that the domain name (the parts after the @ sign) always needs to be equal to the domain name of the identity.

If you like to match the special purpose email addresses abc@example.com and xyx@example.com and like to have a fallback email address main@example.com as well, you could do something like this:

Matched identities can be used to color code messages. The identity color takes precedence over the account color. Setting identity colors is a pro feature.


(35) Why should I be careful with viewing images, attachments, and the original message?

Beim Anschauen von entfernt gespeicherten Bildern (siehe auch diese F&A) kann der Absender nicht nur wissen, dass Sie die Nachricht gesehen haben, er wird auch Ihre IP-Adresse kennen.

Opening attachments or viewing an original message might load remote content and execute scripts, that might not only cause privacy sensitive information to leak, but can also be a security risk.

Note that your contacts could unknowingly send malicious messages if they got infected with malware.

FairEmail formats messages again causing messages to look different from the original, but also uncovering phishing links.

Note that reformatted messages are often better readable than original messages because the margins are removed, and font colors and sizes are standardized.

The Gmail app shows images by default by downloading the images through a Google proxy server. Since the images are downloaded from the source server in real-time, this is even less secure because Google is involved too without providing much benefit.

You can show images and original messages by default for trusted senders on a case-by-case basis by checking Do not ask this again for ....

If you want to reset the default Open with apps, please see here.


(36) How are settings files encrypted?

Short version: AES 256 bit

Long version:

  • Der 256 Bit Schlüssel wird mit PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1 generiert, wobei ein 128 Bit sicheres Zufallssalz und 65536 Iterationen verwendet werden
  • Die Chiffre ist AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding

(37) How are passwords stored?

All supported Android versions encrypt all user data, so all data, including usernames, passwords, messages, etc, is stored encrypted.

If the device is secured with a PIN, pattern or password, you can make the account and identity passwords visible. If this is a problem because you are sharing the device with other people, consider to use user profiles.


(39) How can I reduce the battery usage of FairEmail?

Recent Android versions by default report app usage as a percentage in the Android battery settings screen. Confusingly, app usage is not the same as battery usage and is not even directly related to battery usage! The app usage (while in use) will be very high because FairEmail is using a foreground service which is considered as constant app usage by Android. However, this doesn't mean that FairEmail is constantly using battery power. The real battery usage can be seen by navigating to this screen:

Android settings, Battery, three-dots menu Battery usage, three-dots menu Show full device usage

As a rule of thumb the battery usage should be below or in any case not be much higher than Mobile network standby. If this isn't the case, please let me know.

It is inevitable that synchronizing messages will use battery power because it requires network access and accessing the messages database.

If you are comparing the battery usage of FairEmail with another email client, please make sure the other email client is setup similarly. For example comparing always sync (push messages) and (infrequent) periodic checking for new messages is not a fair comparison.

Reconnecting to an email server will use extra battery power, so an unstable internet connection will result in extra battery usage. In this case you might want to synchronize periodically, for example each hour, instead of continuously. Note that polling frequently (more than every 30-60 minutes) will likely use more battery power than synchronizing always because connecting to the server and comparing the local and remotes messages are expensive operations.

On some devices it is necessary to disable battery optimizations (setup step 4) to keep connections to email servers open.

Most of the battery usage, not considering viewing messages, is due to synchronization (receiving and sending) of messages. So, to reduce the battery usage, set the number of days to synchronize message for to a lower value, especially if there are a lot of recent messages in a folder. Long press a folder name in the folders list and select Edit properties to access this setting.

If you have at least once a day internet connectivity, it is sufficient to synchronize messages just for one day.

Note that you can set the number of days to keep messages for to a higher number than to synchronize messages for. You could for example initially synchronize messages for a large number of days and after this has been completed reduce the number of days to synchronize messages for, but leave the number of days to keep messages for.

In the receive settings you can enable to always synchronize starred messages, which will allow you to keep older messages around while synchronizing messages for a limited number of days.

Disabling the folder option Automatically download message texts and attachments will result in less network traffic and thus less battery usage. You could disable this option for example for the sent folder and the archive.

Synchronizing messages at night is mostly not useful, so you can save on battery usage by not synchronizing at night. In the settings you can select a schedule for message synchronization (this is a pro feature).

FairEmail will by default synchronize the folder list on each connection. Since folders are mostly not created, renamed and deleted very often, you can save some network and battery usage by disabling this in the receive settings.

FairEmail will by default check if old messages were deleted from the server on each connection. If you don't mind that old messages that were delete from the server are still visible in FairEmail, you can save some network and battery usage by disabling this in the receive settings.

Some providers don't follow the IMAP standard and don't keep connections open long enough, forcing FairEmail to reconnect often, causing extra battery usage. You can inspect the Log via the main navigation menu to check if there are frequent reconnects (connection closed/reset, read/write error/timeout, etc). You can workaround this by lowering the keep-alive interval in the advanced account settings to for example 9 or 15 minutes. Note that battery optimizations need to be disabled in setup step 4 to reliably keep connections alive.

Some providers send every two minutes something like 'Still here' resulting in network traffic and your device to wake up and causing unnecessary extra battery usage. You can inspect the Log via the main navigation menu to check if your provider is doing this. If your provider is using Dovecot as IMAP server, you could ask your provider to change the imap_idle_notify_interval setting to a higher value or better yet, to disable this. If your provider is not able or willing to change/disable this, you should consider to switch to periodically instead of continuous synchronization. You can change this in the receive settings.

If you got the message This provider does not support push messages while configuring an account, consider switching to a modern provider which supports push messages (IMAP IDLE) to reduce battery usage.

If your device has an AMOLED screen, you can save battery usage while viewing messages by switching to the black theme.

By default auto optimize in the receive settings is enabled, which will switch an account to periodically checking for new messages when the email server:

  • Says 'Still here' within 3 minutes
  • The email server does not support push messages
  • The keep-alive interval is lower than 12 minutes

(40) How can I reduce the network usage of FairEmail?

You can reduce the network usage basically in the same way as reducing battery usage, see the previous question for suggestions.

By default FairEmail does not download message texts and attachments larger than 256 KiB when there is a metered (mobile or paid Wi-Fi) internet connection. You can change this in the connection settings.


(41) How can I fix the error 'Handshake failed' ?

There are several possible causes, so please read to the end of this answer.

The error 'Handshake failed ... WRONG_VERSION_NUMBER ...' might mean that you are trying to connect to an IMAP or SMTP server without an encrypted connection, typically using port 143 (IMAP) and port 25 (SMTP), or that a wrong protocol (SSL/TLS or STARTTLS) is being used.

Most providers provide encrypted connections using different ports, typically port 993 (IMAP) and port 465/587 (SMTP).

If your provider doesn't support encrypted connections, you should ask to make this possible. If this isn't an option, you could enable Allow insecure connections both in the advanced settings AND the account/identity settings.

Siehe auch diese F&A.

The error 'Handshake failed ... SSLV3_ALERT_ILLEGAL_PARAMETER ...' is either caused by a bug in the SSL protocol implementation or by a too short DH key on the email server and can unfortunately not be fixed by FairEmail.

The error 'Handshake failed ... HANDSHAKE_FAILURE_ON_CLIENT_HELLO ...' might be caused by the provider still using RC4, which isn't supported since Android 7 anymore.

The error 'Handshake failed ... UNSUPPORTED_PROTOCOL oder TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION ...' kann durch das Aktivieren von abgehärteten Verbindungen in den Verbindungseinstellungen verursacht werden oder durch Android, das ältere Protokolle, wie SSLv3, nicht mehr unterstützt.

Android 8 Oreo and later do not support SSLv3 anymore. There is no way to workaround lacking RC4 and SSLv3 support because it has completely been removed from Android (which should say something).

You can use this website or this website to check for SSL/TLS problems of email servers.


(42) Könne Sie einen neuen Anbieter zur Liste der Anbieter hinzufügen?

Wenn der Anbieter von mehr als ein paar Leuten benutzt wird, ja, mit Freude.

Folgende Informationen werden benötigt:

<provider
    name="Gmail"
    link="https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229" // link to the instructions of the provider
    type="com.google"> // das wird nicht benötigt
    <imap
        host="imap.gmail.com"
        port="993"
        starttls="false" />
    <smtp
        host="smtp.gmail.com"
        port="465"
        starttls="false" />
</provider>

Das EFF schreibt: "Zusätzlich, auch wenn Sie STARTTLS perfekt konfigurieren und ein gültiges Zertifikat verwenden, gibt es noch keine Garantie dafür, dass Ihre Kommunikation verschlüsselt wird."

Also sind reine SSL-Verbindungen sicherer als die Verwendung von STARTTLS und daher bevorzugt.

Bitte stellen Sie sicher, dass das Empfangen und Senden von Nachrichten richtig funktioniert, bevor Sie mich kontaktieren, um einen Anbieter hinzuzufügen.

Sehen Sie weiter unten wie Sie mich kontaktieren können.


(43) Can you show the original ... ?

Show original, shows the original message as the sender has sent it, including original fonts, colors, margins, etc. FairEmail does and will not alter this in any way, except for requesting TEXT_AUTOSIZING, which will attempt to make small text more readable.


(44) Can you show contact photos / identicons in the sent folder?

Contact photos and identicons are always shown for the sender because this is necessary for conversation threads. Getting contact photos for both the sender and receiver is not really an option because getting contact photo is an expensive operation.


(45) How can I fix 'This key is not available. To use it, you must import it as one of your own!' ?

You'll get the message This key is not available. To use it, you must import it as one of your own! when trying to decrypt a message with a public key. To fix this you'll need to import the private key.


(46) Why does the message list keep refreshing?

If you see a 'spinner' at the top of the message list, the folder is still being synchronized with the remote server. You can see the progress of the synchronization in the folder list. See the legend about what the icons and numbers mean.

The speed of your device and internet connection and the number of days to synchronize messages for determine how long synchronization will take. Note that you shouldn't set the number of days to synchronize messages for to more than one day in most cases, see also this FAQ.


(47) How do I solve the error 'No primary account or no drafts folder' ?

You'll get the error message No primary account or no drafts folder when trying to compose a message while there is no account set to be the primary account or when there is no drafts folder selected for the primary account. This can happen for example when you start FairEmail to compose a message from another app. FairEmail needs to know where to store the draft, so you'll need to select one account to be the primary account and/or you'll need to select a drafts folder for the primary account.

This can also happen when you try to reply to a message or to forward a message from an account with no drafts folder while there is no primary account or when the primary account does not have a drafts folder.

Please see this FAQ for some more information.


(48) How do I solve the error 'No primary account or no archive folder' ?

You'll get the error message No primary account or no archive folder when searching for messages from another app. FairEmail needs to know where to search, so you'll need to select one account to be the primary account and/or you'll need to select a archive folder for the primary account.


(49) How do I fix 'An outdated app sent a file path instead of a file stream' ?

You likely selected or sent an attachment or image with an outdated file manager or an outdated app which assumes all apps still have storage permissions. For security and privacy reasons modern apps like FairEmail have no full access to all files anymore. This can result into the error message An outdated app sent a file path instead of a file stream if a file name instead of a file stream is being shared with FairEmail because FairEmail cannot randomly open files.

You can fix this by switching to an up-to-date file manager or an app designed for recent Android versions. Alternatively, you can grant FairEmail read access to the storage space on your device in the Android app settings. Note that this workaround won't work on Android Q anymore.

Siehe auch Frage 25 und Was Google dazu schreibt.


(50) Can you add an option to synchronize all messages?

A synchronize all (download all) messages will not be added because it can easily result in out of memory errors and the available storage space filling up. It can also easily result in a lot of battery and data usage. Mobile devices are just not very suitable to download and store years of messages. Sie können bese die Serversuche nutzen (siehe Frage 13), die schneller und effizienter ist. Note that searching through a lot of messages stored locally would only delay searching and use extra battery power.


(51) How are folders sorted?

Folders are first sorted on account order (by default on account name) and within an account with special, system folders on top, followed by folders set to synchronize. Within each category the folders are sorted on (display) name. You can set the display name by long pressing a folder in the folder list and selecting Edit properties.

The navigation (hamburger) menu item Order folders in the setup can be used to manually order the folders.


(52) Why does it take some time to reconnect to an account?

There is no reliable way to know if an account connection was terminated gracefully or forcefully. Trying to reconnect to an account while the account connection was terminated forcefully too often can result in problems like too many simultaneous connections or even the account being blocked. To prevent such problems, FairEmail waits 90 seconds until trying to reconnect again.

You can long press Settings in the navigation menu to reconnect immediately.


(53) Can you stick the message action bar to the top/bottom?

The message action bar works on a single message and the bottom action bar works on all the messages in the conversation. Since there is often more than one message in a conversation, this is not possible. Moreover, there are quite some message specific actions, like forwarding.

Moving the message action bar to the bottom of the message is visually not appealing because there is already a conversation action bar at the bottom of the screen.

Note that there are not many, if any, email apps that display a conversation as a list of expandable messages. This has a lot of advantages, but the also causes the need for message specific actions.


(54) How do I use a namespace prefix?

A namespace prefix is used to automatically remove the prefix providers sometimes add to folder names.

For example the Gmail spam folder is called:

[Gmail]/Spam

By setting the namespace prefix to [Gmail] FairEmail will automatically remove [Gmail]/ from all folder names.


(55) How can I mark all messages as read / move or delete all messages?

You can use multiple select for this. Long press the first message, don't lift your finger and slide down to the last message. Then use the three dot action button to execute the desired action.


(56) Can you add support for JMAP?

There are almost no providers offering the JMAP protocol, so it is not worth a lot of effort to add support for this to FairEmail.


(57) Can I use HTML in signatures?

Yes, you can use HTML in signatures if you paste formatted text into the signature field or use the Edit as HTML menu to enter HTML manually.

Note that including links and images in messages will increase the likelihood that a message will be seen as spam, especially when you send a message to someone for the first time.

See here for which HTML tags are supported.


(58) What does an open/closed email icon mean?

The email icon in the folder list can be open (outlined) or closed (solid):

External image

Message bodies and attachments are not downloaded by default.

External image

Message bodies and attachments are downloaded by default.


(59) Can original messages be opened in the browser?

For security reasons the files with the original message texts are not accessible to other apps, so this is not possible. In theory the Storage Access Framework could be used to share these files, but even Google's Chrome cannot handle this.


(60) Did you know ... ?

  • Did you know that starred messages can be synchronized/kept always? (this can be enabled in the receive settings)
  • Did you know that you can long press the 'write message' icon to go to the drafts folder?
  • Did you know there is an advanced option to mark messages read when they are moved? (archiving and trashing is also moving)
  • Did you know that you can select text (or an email address) in any app on recent Android versions and let FairEmail search for it?
  • Did you know that FairEmail has a tablet mode? Rotate your device in landscape mode and conversation threads will be opened in a second column if there is enough screen space.
  • Did you know that you can long press a reply template to create a draft message from the template?
  • Did you know that you can long press, hold and swipe to select a range of messages?
  • Did you know that you can retry sending messages by using pull-down-to-refresh in the outbox?
  • Did you know that you can swipe a conversation left or right to go to the next or previous conversation?
  • Did you know that you can tap on an image to see where it will be downloaded from?
  • Did you know that you can long press the folder icon in the action bar to select an account?
  • Did you know that you can long press the star icon in a conversation thread to set a colored star?
  • Did you know that you can open the navigation drawer by swiping from the left, even when viewing a conversation?
  • Did you know that you can long press the people's icon to show/hide the CC/BCC fields and remember the visibility state for the next time?
  • Did you know that you can insert the email addresses of an Android contact group via the three dots overflow menu?
  • Did you know that if you select text and hit reply, only the selected text will be quoted?

(61) Why are some messages shown dimmed?

Messages shown dimmed (grayed) are locally moved messages for which the move is not confirmed by the server yet. This can happen when there is no connection to the server or the account (yet). These messages will be synchronized after a connection to the server and the account has been made or, if this never happens, will be deleted if they are too old to be synchronized.

You might need to manually synchronize the folder, for example by pulling down.

You can view these messages, but you cannot move these messages again until the previous move has been confirmed.

Pending operations are shown in the operations view accessible from the main navigation menu.


(62) Which authentication methods are supported?

The following authentication methods are supported and used in this order:

  • LOGIN
  • PLAIN
  • CRAM-MD5
  • XOAUTH2 (Gmail, Yandex)
  • NTLM (untested)

SASL authentication methods, besides CRAM-MD5, are not supported because JavaMail for Android does not support SASL authentication.

If your provider requires an unsupported authentication method, you'll likely get the error message authentication failed.

Server Name Indication is supported by all supported Android versions.


(63) How are images resized for displaying on screens?

Large inline or attached PNG and JPEG images will automatically be resized for displaying on screens. This is because email messages are limited in size, depending on the provider mostly between 10 and 50 MB. Images will by default be resized to a maximum width and height of about 1440 pixels and saved with a compression ratio of 90 %. Images are scaled down using whole number factors to reduce memory usage and to retain image quality. Automatically resizing of inline and/or attached images and the maximum target image size can be configured in the send settings.

If you want to resize images on a case-by-case basis, you can use Send Reduced or a similar app.


(64) Can you add custom actions for swipe left/right?

The most natural thing to do when swiping a list entry left or right is to remove the entry from the list. The most natural action in the context of an email app is moving the message out of the folder to another folder. You can select the folder to move to in the account settings.

Other actions, like marking messages read and snoozing messages are available via multiple selection. You can long press a message to start multiple selection. Siehe auch diese Frage.

Swiping left or right to mark a message read or unread is unnatural because the message first goes away and later comes back in a different shape. Note that there is an advanced option to mark messages automatically read on moving, which is in most cases a perfect replacement for the sequence mark read and move to some folder. You can also mark messages read from new message notifications.

If you want to read a message later, you can hide it until a specific time by using the snooze menu.


(65) Why are some attachments shown dimmed?

Inline (image) attachments are shown dimmed. Inline attachments are supposed to be downloaded and shown automatically, but since FairEmail doesn't always download attachments automatically, see also this FAQ, FairEmail shows all attachment types. To distinguish inline and regular attachments, inline attachments are shown dimmed.


(66) Is FairEmail available in the Google Play Family Library?

Der Preis für FairEmail ist dafür zu niedrig, niedriger als bei fast allen ähnlichen Apps, und es müssen zu viele Gebühren und Steuern entrichtet werden. Google kassiert alleine schon 30 % dafür, dass FairEmail in der Google Play-Familienmediathek zur Verfügung gestellt wird. Note that Google promotes the Family libray, but lets developers pay for it and doesn't contribute anything.


(67) How can I snooze conversations?

Multiple select one of more conversations (long press to start multiple selecting), tap the three dot button and select Snooze .... Alternatively, in the expanded message view use Snooze ... in the message three-dots 'more' menu or the timelapse action in the bottom action bar. Select the time the conversation(s) should snooze and confirm by tapping OK. The conversations will be hidden for the selected time and shown again afterwards. You will receive a new message notification as reminder.

It is also possible to snooze messages with a rule.

You can show snoozed messages by unchecking Filter out > Hidden in the three dot overflow menu.

You can tap on the small snooze icon to see until when a conversation is snoozed.

By selecting a zero snooze duration you can cancel snoozing.


(68) Why can Adobe Acrobat reader not open PDF attachments / Microsoft apps not open attached documents?

Adobe Acrobat reader and Microsoft apps still expects full access to all stored files, while apps should use the Storage Access Framework since Android KitKat (2013) to have access to actively shared files only. This is for privacy and security reasons.

You can workaround this by saving the attachment and opening it from the Adobe Acrobat reader / Microsoft app, but you are advised to install an up-to-date and preferably open source PDF reader / document viewer, for example one listed here.


(69) Can you add auto scroll up on new message?

The message list is automatically scrolled up when navigating from a new message notification or after a manual refresh. Always automatically scrolling up on arrival of new messages would interfere with your own scrolling, but if you like you can enable this in the settings.


(70) When will messages be auto expanded?

When navigation to a conversation one message will be expanded if:

  • There is just one message in the conversation
  • There is exactly one unread message in the conversation

There is one exception: the message was not downloaded yet and the message is too large to download automatically on a metered (mobile) connection. You can set or disable the maximum message size on the 'connection' settings tab.

Duplicate (archived) messages, trashed messages and draft messages are not counted.

Messages will automatically be marked read on expanding, unless this was disabled in the individual account settings.


(71) How do I use filter rules?

You can edit filter rules by long pressing a folder in the folder list.

New rules will be applied to new messages received in the folder, not to existing messages. You can check the rule and apply the rule to existing messages or, alternatively, long press the rule in the rule list and select Execute now.

You'll need to give a rule a name and you'll need to define the order in which a rule should be executed relative to other rules.

You can disable a rule and you can stop processing other rules after a rule has been executed.

The following rule conditions are available:

  • Sender contains
  • Recipient contains
  • Subject contains
  • Has attachments
  • Header contains
  • Day/time between

All the conditions of a rule need to be true for the rule action to be executed. All conditions are optional, but there needs to be at least one condition, to prevent matching all messages. If you want to match all senders or all recipients, you can just use the @ character as condition because all email addresses will contain this character.

Note that email addresses are formatted like this:

"Somebody" <somebody@example.org>

You can use multiple rules, possibly with a stop processing, for an or or a not condition.

Matching is not case sensitive, unless you use regular expressions. Please see here for the documentation of Java regular expressions. You can test a regex here.

Note that a regular expression supports an or operator, so if you want to match multiple senders, you can do this:

.*alice@example\.org.*|.*bob@example\.org.*|.*carol@example\.org.*

Note that dot all mode is enabled to be able to match unfolded headers.

You can select one of these actions to apply to matching messages:

  • No action (useful for not)
  • Mark as read
  • Mark as unread
  • Hide
  • Suppress notification
  • Snooze
  • Add star
  • Set importance (local priority)
  • Add keyword
  • Move
  • Copy (Gmail: label)
  • Answer (with template)
  • Text-to-speech (sender and subject)
  • Automation (Tasker, etc)

Rules are applied directly after the message header has been fetched, but before the message text has been downloaded, so it is not possible to apply conditions to the message text. Note that large message texts are downloaded on demand on a metered connection to save on data usage.

If you want to forward a message, consider to use the move action instead. This will be more reliable than forwarding as well because forwarded messages might be considered as spam.

Since message headers are not downloaded and stored by default to save on battery and data usage and to save storage space it is not possible to preview which messages would match a header rule condition.

Some common header conditions (regex):

  • .*Auto-Submitted:.* RFC3834
  • .*Content-Type: multipart/report.* RFC3462

In the three-dots more message menu there is an item to create a rule for a received message with the most common conditions filled in.

The POP3 protocol does not support setting keywords and moving or copying messages.

Using rules is a pro feature.


(72) What are primary accounts/identities?

The primary account is used when the account is ambiguous, for example when starting a new draft from the unified inbox.

Similarly, the primary identity of an account is used when the identity is ambiguous.

There can be just one primary account and there can be just one primary identity per account.


(73) Is moving messages across accounts safe/efficient?

Moving messages across accounts is safe because the raw, original messages will be downloaded and moved and because the source messages will be deleted only after the target messages have been added

Batch moving messages across accounts is efficient if both the source folder and target folder are set to synchronize, else FairEmail needs to connect to the folder(s) for each message.


(74) Why do I see duplicate messages?

Some providers, notably Gmail, list all messages in all folders, except trashed messages, in the archive (all messages) folder too. FairEmail shows all these messages in a non obtrusive way to indicate that these messages are in fact the same message.

Gmail allows one message to have multiple labels, which are presented to FairEmail as folders. This means that messages with multiple labels will be shown multiple times as well.


(75) Can you make an iOS, Windows, Linux, etc version?

A lot of knowledge and experience is required to successfully develop an app for a specific platform, which is why I develop apps for Android only.


(76) What does 'Clear local messages' do?

The folder menu Clear local messages removes messages from the device which are present on the server too. It does not delete messages from the server. This can be useful after changing the folder settings to not download the message content (text and attachments), for example to save space.


(77) Why are messages sometimes shown with a small delay?

Depending on the speed of your device (processor speed and maybe even more memory speed) messages might be displayed with a small delay. FairEmail is designed to dynamically handle a large number of messages without running out of memory. This means that messages needs to be read from a database and that this database needs to be watched for changes, both of which might cause small delays.

Some convenience features, like grouping messages to display conversation threads and determining the previous/next message, take a little extra time. Note that there is no the next message because in the meantime a new message might have been arrived.

When comparing the speed of FairEmail with similar apps this should be part of the comparison. It is easy to write a similar, faster app which just displays a lineair list of messages while possible using too much memory, but it is not so easy to properly manage resource usage and to offer more advanced features like conversation threading.

FairEmail is based on the state-of-the-art Android architecture components, so there is little room for performance improvements.


(78) How do I use schedules?

In the receive settings you can enable scheduling and set the time period and the day of weeks when messages should be received.

Note that an end time equal to or earlier than the start time is considered to be 24 hours later.

For more complex schemes you could set one or more accounts to manual synchronization and send this command to FairEmail to check for new messages:

(adb shell) am startservice -a eu.faircode.email.POLL

For a specific account:

(adb shell) am startservice -a eu.faircode.email.POLL --es account Gmail

You can also automate turning receiving messages on and off by sending these commands to FairEmail:

(adb shell) am startservice -a eu.faircode.email.ENABLE
(adb shell) am startservice -a eu.faircode.email.DISABLE

To enable/disable a specific account:

(adb shell) am startservice -a eu.faircode.email.ENABLE --es account Gmail
(adb shell) am startservice -a eu.faircode.email.DISABLE --es account Gmail

Note that disabling an account will hide the account and all associated folders and messages.

You can automatically send commands with for example Tasker:

New task: Something recognizable
Action Category: Misc/Send Intent
Action: eu.faircode.email.ENABLE
Target: Service

To enable/disable an account with the name Gmail:

Extras: account:Gmail

Account names are case sensitive.

Automation can be used for more advanced schedules, like for example multiple synchronization periods per day or different synchronization periods for different days.

It is possible to install FairEmail in multiple user profiles, for example a personal and a work profile, and to configure FairEmail differently in each profile, which is another possibility to have different synchronization schedules and to synchronize a different set of accounts.

It is also possible to create rules with a time condition and to snooze messages until the end time of the time condition. This way it is possible to snooze business related messages until the start of the business hours. This also means that the messages will be on your device for when there is no internet connection, for example when flying.

Scheduling is a pro feature.


(79) How do I use synchronize on demand (manual)?

Normally, FairEmail maintains a connection to the configured email servers whenever possible to receive messages in real-time. If you don't want this, for example to be not disturbed or to save on battery usage, just disable receiving in the receive settings. This will stop the background service which takes care of automatic synchronization and will remove the associated status bar notification.

You can also enable Synchronize manually in the advanced account settings if you want to manually synchronize specific accounts only.

You can use pull-down-to-refresh in a message list or use the folder menu Synchronize now to manually synchronize messages.

If you want to synchronize some or all folders of an account manually, just disable synchronization for the folders (but not of the account).

You'll likely want to disabled browse on server too.


(80) How do I fix the error 'Unable to load BODYSTRUCTURE' ?

The error message Unable to load BODYSTRUCTURE is caused by bugs in the email server, see here for more details.

FairEmail already tries to workaround these bugs, but if this fail you'll need to ask for support from your provider.


(81) Can you make the background of the original message dark in the dark theme?

The original message is shown as the sender has sent it, including all colors. Changing the background color would not only make the original view not original anymore, it can also result in unreadable messages.


(82) What is a tracking image?

Please see here about what a tracking image exactly is. In short tracking images keep track if you opened a message.

FairEmail will in most cases automatically recognize tracking images and replace them by this icon:

External image

Automatic recognition of tracking images can be disabled in the privacy settings.


(84) What are local contacts for?

Local contact information is based on names and addresses found in incoming and outgoing messages.

The main use of the local contacts storage is to offer auto completion when no contacts permission has been granted to FairEmail.

Another use is to generate shortcuts on recent Android versions to quickly send a message to frequently contacted people. This is also why the number of times contacted and the last time contacted is being recorded and why you can make a contact a favorite or exclude it from favorites by long pressing it.

The list of contacts is sorted on number of times contacted and the last time contacted.

By default only names and addresses to whom you send messages to will be recorded. You can change this in the send settings.


(85) Why is an identity not available?

An identity is available for sending a new message or replying or forwarding an existing message only if:

  • the identity is set to synchronize (send messages)
  • the associated account is set to synchronize (receive messages)
  • the associated account has a drafts folder

FairEmail will try to select the best identity based on the to address of the message replied to / being forwarded.


(86) What are 'extra privacy features'?

The advanced option extra privacy features enables:

  • Looking up the owner of the IP address of a link
  • Detection and removal of tracking images

(87) What does 'invalid credentials' mean?

The error message invalid credentials means either that the user name and/or password is incorrect, for example because the password was changed or expired, or that the account authorization has expired.

If the password is incorrect/expired, you will have to update the password in the account and/or identity settings.

If the account authorization has expired, you will have to select the account again. You will likely need to save the associated identity again as well.


(88) How can I use a Yahoo, AOL or Sky account?

To authorize a Yahoo, AOL, or Sky account you will need to create an app password. For instructions, please see here:

Please see this FAQ about OAuth support.

Note that Yahoo, AOL, and Sky do not support standard push messages. The Yahoo email app uses a proprietary, undocumented protocol for push messages.

Push messages require IMAP IDLE and the Yahoo email server does not report IDLE as capability:

Y1 CAPABILITY
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 ID MOVE NAMESPACE XYMHIGHESTMODSEQ UIDPLUS LITERAL+ CHILDREN X-MSG-EXT UNSELECT OBJECTID
Y1 OK CAPABILITY completed

(89) How can I send plain text only messages?

By default FairEmail sends each message both as plain text and as HTML formatted text because almost every receiver expects formatted messages these days. If you want/need to send plain text messages only, you can enable this in the advanced identity options. You might want to create a new identity for this if you want/need to select sending plain text messages on a case-by-case basis.


(90) Why are some texts linked while not being a link?

FairEmail will automatically link not linked web links (http and https) and not linked email addresses (mailto) for your convenience. However, texts and links are not easily distinguished, especially not with lots of top level domains being words. This is why texts with dots are sometimes incorrectly recognized as links, which is better than not recognizing some links.

Links for less usual protocols like telnet and ftp will not automatically be linked.


(91) Can you add periodical synchronization to save battery power?

Synchronizing messages is an expensive proces because the local and remote messages need to be compared, so periodically synchronizing messages will not result in saving battery power, more likely the contrary.

See this FAQ about optimizing battery usage.


(92) Can you add spam filtering, verification of the DKIM signature and SPF authorization?

Spam filtering, verification of the DKIM signature and SPF authorization is a task of email servers, not of an email client. Servers generally have more memory and computing power, so they are much better suited to this task than battery-powered devices. Also, you'll want spam filtered for all your email clients, possibly including web email, not just one email client. Moreover, email servers have access to information, like the IP address, etc of the connecting server, which an email client has no access to.

Of course you can report messages as spam with FairEmail, which will move the reported messages to the spam folder and train the spam filter of the provider, which is how it is supposed to work. This can be done automatically with filter rules too. Blocking the sender will create a filter rule to automatically move future messages of the same sender into the spam folder.

Note that you should not delete spam messages, also not from the spam folder, because the email server uses the messages in the spam folder to "learn" what spam messages are.

If you receive a lot of spam messages in your inbox, the best you can do is to contact the email provider to ask if spam filtering can be improved.

Also, FairEmail can show a small red warning flag when DKIM, SPF or DMARC authentication failed on the receiving server. You can enable/disable authentication verification in the display settings.

FairEmail can show a warning flag too if the domain name of the (reply) email address of the sender does not define an MX record pointing to an email server. This can be enabled in the receive settings. Be aware that this will slow down synchronization of messages significantly.

If legitimate messages are failing authentication, you should notify the sender because this will result in a high risk of messages ending up in the spam folder. Moreover, without proper authentication there is a risk the sender will be impersonated. The sender might use this tool to check authentication and other things.


(93) Can you allow installation/data storage on external storage media (sdcard)?

FairEmail uses services and alarms, provides widgets and listens for the boot completed event to be started on device start, so it is not possible to store the app on external storage media, like an sdcard. See also here.

Messages, attachments, etc stored on external storage media, like an sdcard, can be accessed by other apps and is therefore not safe. See here for the details.

When needed you can save (raw) messages via the three-dots menu just above the message text and save attachments by tapping on the floppy icon.

If you need to save on storage space, you can limit the number of days messages are being synchronized and kept for. You can change these settings by long pressing a folder in the folder list and selecting Edit properties.


(94) What does the red/orange stripe at the end of the header mean?

The red/orange stripe at the left side of the header means that the DKIM, SPF or DMARC authentication failed. See also this FAQ.


(95) Why are not all apps shown when selecting an attachment or image?

For privacy and security reasons FairEmail does not have permissions to directly access files, instead the Storage Access Framework, available and recommended since Android 4.4 KitKat (released in 2013), is used to select files.

If an app is listed depends on if the app implements a document provider. If the app is not listed, you might need to ask the developer of the app to add support for the Storage Access Framework.

Android Q will make it harder and maybe even impossible to directly access files, see here and here for more details.


(96) Where can I find the IMAP and SMTP settings?

The IMAP settings are part of the (custom) account settings and the SMTP settings are part of the identity settings.


(97) What is 'cleanup' ?

About each four hours FairEmail runs a cleanup job that:

  • Removes old message texts
  • Removes old attachment files
  • Removes old image files
  • Removes old local contacts
  • Removes old log entries

Note that the cleanup job will only run when the synchronize service is active.


(98) Why can I still pick contacts after revoking contacts permissions?

After revoking contacts permissions Android does not allow FairEmail access to your contacts anymore. However, picking contacts is delegated to and done by Android and not by FairEmail, so this will still be possible without contacts permissions.


(99) Can you add a rich text or markdown editor?

FairEmail provides common text formatting (bold, italic, underline, text size and color) via a toolbar that appears after selecting some text.

A Rich text or Markdown editor would not be used by many people on a small mobile device and, more important, Android doesn't support a rich text editor and most rich text editor open source projects are abandoned. See here for some more details about this.


(100) How can I synchronize Gmail categories?

You can synchronize Gmail categories by creating filters to label categorized messages:

  • Create a new filter via Gmail > Settings (wheel) > Filters and Blocked Addresses > Create a new filter
  • Enter a category search (see below) in the Has the words field and click Create filter
  • Check Apply the label and select a label and click Create filter

Possible categories:

category:social
category:updates
category:forums
category:promotions

Unfortunately, this is not possible for snoozed messages folder.

You can use Force sync in the three-dots menu of the unified inbox to let FairEmail synchronize the folder list again and you can long press the folders to enable synchronization.


(101) What does the blue/orange dot at the bottom of the conversations mean?

The dot shows the relative position of the conversation in the message list. The dot will be show orange when the conversation is the first or last in the message list, else it will be blue. The dot is meant as an aid when swiping left/right to go to the previous/next conversation.

The dot is disabled by default and can be enabled with the display settings Show relative conversation position with a dot.


(102) How can I enable auto rotation of images?

Images will automatically be rotated when automatic resizing of images is enabled in the settings (enabled by default). However, automatic rotating depends on the Exif information to be present and to be correct, which is not always the case. Particularly not when taking a photo with a camara app from FairEmail.

Note that only JPEG and PNG images can contain Exif information.


(103) How can I record audio?

You can record audio if you have a recording app installed which supports the RECORD_SOUND_ACTION intent. If no supported app is installed, FairEmail will not show a record audio action/icon.

Unfortunately and surprisingly, most recording apps do not seem to support this intent (they should).


(104) What do I need to know about error reporting?

  • Error reports will help improve FairEmail
  • Error reporting is optional and opt-in
  • Error reporting can be enabled/disabled in the settings, section miscellaneous
  • Error reports will automatically be sent anonymously to Bugsnag
  • Bugsnag for Android is open source
  • See here about what data will be sent in case of errors
  • See here for the privacy policy of Bugsnag
  • Error reports will be sent to sessions.bugsnag.com:443 and notify.bugsnag.com:443

(105) How does the roam-like-at-home option work?

FairEmail will check if the country code of the SIM card and the country code of the network are in the EU roam-like-at-home countries and assumes no roaming if the country codes are equal and the advanced roam-like-at-home option is enabled.

So, you don't have to disable this option if you don't have an EU SIM or are not connected to an EU network.


(106) Which launchers can show a badge count with the number of unread messages?

Please see here for a list of launchers which can show the number of unread messages.

Note that the notification setting Show launcher icon with number of new messages needs to be enabled (default enabled).

Only new unread messages in folders set to show new message notifications will be counted, so messages marked unread again and messages in folders set to not show new message notification will not be counted.

Depending on what you want, the notification settings Let the number of new messages match the number of notifications needs to be enabled or disabled.

This feature depends on support of your launcher. FairEmail merely 'broadcasts' the number of unread messages using the ShortcutBadger library. If it doesn't work, this cannot be fixed by changes in FairEmail.

Some launchers display '1' for the monitoring notification, despite FairEmail explicitly requesting not to show a badge for this notification. This could be caused by a bug in the launcher app or in your Android version. Please double check if the notification dot is disabled for the receive (service) notification channel. You can go to the right notification channel settings via the notification settings of FairEmail. This might not be obvious, but you can tap on the channel name for more settings.

Note that Tesla Unread is not supported anymore.

FairEmail does send a new message count intent as well:

eu.faircode.email.NEW_MESSAGE_COUNT

The number of new, unread messages will be in an integer "count" parameter.


(107) How do I use colored stars?

You can set a colored star via the more message menu, via multiple selection (started by long pressing a message), by long pressing a star in a conversation or automatically by using rules.

You need to know that colored stars are not supported by the IMAP protocol and can therefore not be synchronized to an email server. This means that colored stars will not be visible in other email clients and will be lost on downloading messages again. However, the stars (without color) will be synchronized and will be visible in other email clients, when supported.

Some email clients use IMAP keywords for colors. However, not all servers support IMAP keywords and besides that there are no standard keywords for colors.


(108) Can you add permanently delete messages from any folder?

When you delete messages from a folder the messages will be moved to the trash folder, so you have a chance to restore the messages. You can permanently delete messages from the trash folder. Permanently delete messages from other folders would defeat the purpose of the trash folder, so this will not be added.


(109) Why is 'select account' available in official versions only?

Using select account to select and authorize Google accounts require special permission from Google for security and privacy reasons. This special permission can only be acquired for apps a developer manages and is responsible for. Third party builds, like the F-Droid builds, are managed by third parties and are the responsibility of these third parties. So, only these third parties can acquire the required permission from Google. Since these third parties do not actually support FairEmail, they are most likely not going to request the required permission.

You can solve this in two ways:

  • Switch to the official version of FairEmail, see here for the options
  • Use app specific passwords, see this FAQ

Using select account in third party builds is not possible in recent versions anymore. In older versions this was possible, but it will now result in the error UNREGISTERED_ON_API_CONSOLE.


(110) Why are (some) messages empty and/or attachments corrupt?

Empty messages and/or corrupt attachments are probably being caused by a bug in the server software. Older Microsoft Exchange software is known to cause this problem. Mostly you can workaround this by disabling Partial fetch in the advanced account settings:

Setup > Step 1 > Manage > Tap account > Tap advanced > Partial fetch > uncheck

After disabling this setting, you can use the message 'more' (three dots) menu to 'resync' empty messages. Alternatively, you can Delete local messages by long pressing the folder(s) in the folder list and synchronize all messages again.

Disabling Partial fetch will result in more memory usage.


(111) Is OAuth supported?

OAuth for Gmail is supported via the quick setup wizard. The Android account manager will be used to fetch and refresh OAuth tokens for selected on-device accounts. OAuth for non on-device accounts is not supported because Google requires a yearly security audit ($15,000 to $75,000) for this.

OAuth for Yandex is supported via the quick setup wizard.

OAuth for Office 365 accounts is supported, but Microsoft does not offer OAuth for Outlook, Live and Hotmail accounts (yet?).

OAuth access for Yahoo was requested, but Yahoo never responded to the request. OAuth for AOL was deactivated by AOL. Verizon owns both AOL and Yahoo, collectively named Oath inc. So, it is reasonable to assume that OAuth is not supported by Yahoo anymore too.


(112) Which email provider do you recommend?

FairEmail is an email client only, so you need to bring your own email address.

There are plenty of email providers to choose from. Which email provider is best for you depends on your wishes/requirements. Please see the websites of Restore privacy or Privacy Tools for a list of privacy oriented email providers with advantages and disadvantages.

Some providers, like ProtonMail, Tutanota, use proprietary email protocols, which make it impossible to use third party email apps. Please see this FAQ for more information.

Using your own (custom) domain name, which is supported by most email providers, will make it easier to switch to another email provider.


(113) How does biometric authentication work?

If your device has a biometric sensor, for example a fingerprint sensor, you can enable/disable biometric authentication in the navigation (hamburger) menu of the setup screen. When enabled FairEmail will require biometric authentication after a period of inactivity or after the screen has been turned off while FairEmail was running. Activity is navigation within FairEmail, for example opening a conversation thread. The inactivity period duration can be configured in the miscellaneous settings. When biometric authentication is enabled new message notifications will not show any content and FairEmail won't be visible on the Android recents screen.

Biometric authentication is meant to prevent others from seeing your messages only. FairEmail relies on device encryption for data encryption, see also this FAQ.

Biometric authentication is a pro feature.


(114) Can you add an import for the settings of other email apps?

The format of the settings files of most other email apps is not documented, so this is difficult. Sometimes it is possible to reverse engineer the format, but as soon as the settings format changes things will break. Also, settings are often incompatible. For example, FairEmail has unlike most other email apps settings for the number of days to synchronize messages for and for the number of days to keep messages for, mainly to save on battery usage. Moreover, setting up an account/identity with the quick setup is simple, so it is not really worth the effort.


(115) Can you add email address chips?

Email address chips look nice, but cannot be edited, which is quite inconvenient when you made a typo in an email address.

Note that FairEmail will select the address only when long pressing an address, which makes it easy to delete an address.

Chips are not suitable for showing in a list and since the message header in a list should look similar to the message header of the message view it is not an option to use chips for viewing messages.

Reverted commit.


(116) How can I show images in messages from trusted senders by default?

You can show images in messages from trusted senders by default by enabled the display setting Automatically show images for known contacts.

Contacts in the Android contacts list are considered to be known and trusted, unless the contact is in the group / has the label 'Untrusted' (case insensitive).


(117) Can you help me restore my purchase?

Google manages all purchases, so as a developer I have little control over purchases. So, basically the only thing I can do, is give some advice:

  • Make sure you have an active, working internet connection
  • Make sure you are logged in with the right Google account and that there is nothing wrong with your Google account
  • Make sure you installed FairEmail via the right Google account if you configured multiple Google accounts on your device
  • Open the Play store app and wait at least a minute to give it time to synchronize with the Google servers
  • Open FairEmail and navigate to the pro features screen to let FairEmail check the purchases

You can also try to clear the cache of the Play store app via the Android apps settings. Restarting the device might be necessary to let the Play store recognize the purchase correctly.

Note that:

  • Purchases are stored in the Google cloud and cannot get lost
  • There is no time limit on purchases, so they cannot expire
  • Google does not expose details (name, e-mail, etc) about buyers to developers
  • An app like FairEmail cannot select which Google account to use
  • It may take a while until the Play store app has synchronized a purchase to another device
  • Play Store purchases cannot be used without the Play Store, which is also not allowed by Play Store rules

If you cannot solve the problem with the purchase, you will have to contact Google about it.


(118) What does 'Remove tracking parameters' exactly?

Checking Remove tracking parameters will remove all UTM parameters from a link.


(119) Can you add colors to the unified inbox widget?

The widget is designed to look good on most home/launcher screens by making it monochrome and by using a half transparent background. This way the widget will nicely blend in, while still being properly readable.

Adding colors will cause problems with some backgrounds and will cause readability problems, which is why this won't be added.

Due to Android limitations it is not possible to dynamically set the opacity of the background and to have rounded corners at the same time.


(120) Why are new message notifications not removed on opening the app?

New message notifications will be removed on swiping notifications away or on marking the associated messages read. Opening the app will not remove new message notifications. This gives you a choice to leave new message notifications as a reminder that there are still unread messages.

On Android 7 Nougat and later new message notifications will be grouped. Tapping on the summary notification will open the unified inbox. The summary notification can be expanded to view individual new message notifications. Tapping on an individual new message notification will open the conversation the message it is part of. See this FAQ about when messages in a conversation will be auto expanded and marked read.


(121) How are messages grouped into a conversation?

By default FairEmail groups messages in conversations. This can be turned of in the display settings.

FairEmail groups messages based on the standard Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References headers. FairEmail does not group on other criteria, like the subject, because this could result in grouping unrelated messages and would be at the expense of increased battery usage.


(122) Why is the recipient name/email address show with a warning color?

The recipient name and/or email address in the addresses section will be shown in a warning color when the sender domain name and the domain name of the to address do not match. Mostly this indicates that the message was received via an account with another email address.


(123) What will happen when FairEmail cannot connect to an email server?

When FairEmail cannot connect to an email server to receive messages, for example when the internet connection is bad or a firewall or a VPN is blocking the connection, FairEmail will wait 8, 16 and 32 seconds while keeping the device awake (=use battery power) and try again to connect. If this fails, FairEmail will schedule an alarm to retry after 15, 30 and 60 minutes and let the device sleep (=no battery usage).

Between connectivity changes there is a wait of 90 seconds to give the email server the opportunity to discover the old connection is broken. This is necessary because the internet connection of a mobile device is often lost abruptly and to prevent the problem described in this FAQ.

Note that Android doze mode does not allow to wake the device earlier than after 15 minutes.

Force sync in the three-dots menu of the unified inbox can be used to let FairEmail attempt to reconnect without waiting.

Sending messages will be retried on connectivity changes only (reconnecting to the same network or connecting to another network) to prevent the email server from blocking the connection permanently. You can pull down the outbox to retry manually.

Note that sending will not be retried in case of authentication problems and when the server rejected the message. In this case you can open/expand the message and use the undo icon to move the message to the drafts folder, possible change it and send it again.


(124) Why do I get 'Message too large or too complex to display'?

The message Message too large or too complex to display will be shown if there are more than 100,000 characters or more than 500 links in a message. Reformatting and displaying such messages will take too long. You can try to use the original message view, powered by the browser, instead.


(125) What are the current experimental features?

  • ...

(126) Can message previews be sent to my wearable?

FairEmail fetches a message in two steps:

  1. Fetch message headers
  2. Fetch message text and attachments

Directly after the first step new messages will be notified. However, only until after the second step the message text will be available. FairEmail updates exiting notifications with a preview of the message text, but unfortunately wearable notifications cannot be updated.

Since there is no guarantee that a message text will always be fetched directly after a message header, it is not possible to guarantee that a new message notification with a preview text will always be sent to a wearable.

If you think this is good enough, you can enable the notification option Only send notifications with a message preview to wearables and if this does not work, you can try to enable the notification option Show notifications with a preview text only.

If you want to have the full message text sent to your wearable, you can enable the notification option Preview all text. Note that some wearables are known to crash with this option enabled.

If you use a Samsung wearable with the Galaxy Wearable (Samsung Gear) app, you might need to enable notifications for FairEmail when the setting Notifications, Apps installed in the future is turned off in this app.


(127) How can I fix 'Syntactically invalid HELO argument(s)'?

The error ... Syntactically invalid HELO argument(s) ... means that the SMTP server rejected the local IP address or host name. You can likely fix this error by enabling or disabling the advanced indentity option Use local IP address instead of host name.


(128) How can I reset asked questions, for example to show images?

You can reset asked questions via the three dots overflow menu in the miscellaneous settings.


(129) Are ProtonMail, Tutanota supported?

ProtonMail uses a proprietary email protocol and does not directly support IMAP, so you cannot use FairEmail to access ProtonMail.

Tutanota uses a proprietary email protocol and does not support IMAP, so you cannot use FairEmail to access Tutanota.


(130) What does message error ... mean?

A series of lines with orangish or red texts with technical information means that debug mode was enabled in the miscellaneous settings.

The warning No server found at ... means that there was no email server registered at the indicated domain name. Replying to the message might not be possible and might result in an error. This could indicate a falsified email address and/or spam.

The error ... ParseException ... means that there is a problem with a received message, likely caused by a bug in the sending software. FairEmail will workaround this is in most cases, so this message can mostly be considered as a warning instead of an error.

The error ...SendFailedException... means that there was a problem while sending a message. The error will almost always include a reason. Common reasons are that the message was too big or that one or more recipient addresses were invalid.

The warning Message too large to fit into the available memory means that the message was larger than 10 MiB. Even if your device has plenty of storage space Android provides limited working memory to apps, which limits the size of messages that can be handled.

Please see here for other error messages in the outbox.


(131) Can you change the direction for swiping to previous/next message?

If you read from left to right, swiping to the left will show the next message. Similarly, if you read from right to left, swiping to the right will show the next message.

This behavior seems quite natural to me, also because it is similar to turning pages.

Anyway, there is a behavior setting to reverse the swipe direction.


(132) Why are new message notifications silent?

Notifications are silent by default on some MIUI versions. Please see here how you can fix this.

There is a bug in some Android versions causing setOnlyAlertOnce to mute notifications. Since FairEmail shows new message notifications right after fetching the message headers and FairEmail needs to update new message notifications after fetching the message text later, this cannot be fixed or worked around by FairEmail.

Android might rate limit the notification sound, which can cause some new message notifications to be silent.


(133) Why is ActiveSync not supported?

The Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol is patented and can therefore not be supported. For this reason you won't find many, if any, other email clients supporting ActiveSync.

The Microsoft Exchange Web Services protocol is being phased out.

Note that the desciption of FairEmail starts with the remark that non-standard protocols, like Microsoft Exchange Web Services and Microsoft ActiveSync are not supported.


(134) Can you add deleting local messages?

POP3

In the account settings (Setup, step 1, Manage, tap account) you can enable Leave deleted messages on server.

IMAP

Since the IMAP protocol is meant to synchronize two ways, deleting a message from the device would result in fetching the message again when synchronizing again.

However, FairEmail supports hiding messages, either via the three-dots menu in the action bar just above the message text or by multiple selecting messages in the message list. Basically this is the same as "leave on server" of the POP3 protocol with the advantage that you can show the messages again when needed.

Note that it is possible to set the swipe left or right action to hide a message.


(135) Why are trashed messages and drafts shown in conversations?

Individual messages will rarely be trashed and mostly this happens by accident. Showing trashed messages in conversations makes it easier to find them back.

You can permanently delete a message using the message three-dots delete menu, which will remove the message from the conversation. Note that this irreversible.

Similarly, drafts are shown in conversations to find them back in the context where they belong. It is easy to read through the received messages before continuing to write the draft later.


(136) How can I delete an account/identity/folder?

Deleting an account/identity/folder is a little bit hidden to prevent accidents.

  • Account: Setup > Step 1 > Manage > Tap account
  • Identity: Setup > Step 2 > Manage > Tap identity
  • Folder: Long press the folder in the folder list > Edit properties

In the three-dots overflow menu at the top right there is an item to delete the account/identity/folder.


(137) How can I reset 'Don't ask again'?

You can reset all questions set to be not asked again in the miscellaneous settings.


(138) Can you add calendar/contact management/synchronizing?

Calendar and contact management can better be done by a separate, specialized app. Note that FairEmail is a specialized email app, not an office suite.

Also, I prefer to do a few things very well, instead of many things only half. Moreover, from a security perspective, it is not a good idea to grant many permissions to a single app.

You are advised to use the excellent, open source DAVx⁵ app to synchronize/manage your calendars/contacts.

Most providers support exporting your contacts. Please see here about how you can import contacts if synchronizing is not possible.

Note that FairEmail does support replying to calendar invites (a pro feature) and adding calendar invites to your personal calendar.


(139) How do I fix 'User is authenticated but not connected'?

In fact this Microsoft Exchange specific error is an incorrect error message caused by a bug in older Exchange server software.

The error User is authenticated but not connected might occur if:

  • Push messages are enabled for too many folders: see this FAQ for more information and a workaround
  • The account password was changed: changing it in FairEmail too should fix the problem
  • An alias email address is being used as username instead of the primary email address
  • An incorrect login scheme is being used for a shared mailbox: the right scheme is username@domain\SharedMailboxAlias

The shared mailbox alias will mostly be the email address of the shared account, like this:

you@example.com\shared@example.com

Note that it should be a backslash and not a forward slash.


(140) Why does the message text contain strange characters?

Displaying strange characters is almost always caused by specifying no or an invalid character encoding by the sending software. FairEmail will assume ISO 8859-1 when no character set or when US-ASCII was specified. Other than that there is no way to reliably determine the correct character encoding automatically, so this cannot be fixed by FairEmail. The right action is to complain to the sender.


(141) How can I fix 'A drafts folder is required to send messages'?

To store draft messages a drafts folder is required. In most cases FairEmail will automatically select the drafts folders on adding an account based on the attributes the email server sends. However, some email servers are not configured properly and do not send these attributes. In this case FairEmail tries to identify the drafts folder by name, but this might fail if the drafts folder has an unusual name or is not present at all.

You can fix this problem by manually selecting the drafts folder in the account settings (Setup, step 1, tap account, at the bottom). If there is no drafts folder at all, you can create a drafts folder by tapping on the '+' button in the folder list of the account (tap on the account name in the navigation menu).

Some providers, like Gmail, allow enabling/disabling IMAP for individual folders. So, if a folder is not visible, you might need to enable IMAP for the folder.

Quick link for Gmail: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/labels


(142) How can I store sent messages in the inbox?

Generally, it is not a good idea to store sent messages in the inbox because this is hard to undo and could be incompatible with other email clients.

That said, FairEmail is able to properly handle sent messages in the inbox. FairEmail will mark outgoing messages with a sent messages icon for example.

The best solution would be to enable showing the sent folder in the unified inbox by long pressing the sent folder in the folder list and enabling Show in unified inbox. This way all messages can stay where they belong, while allowing to see both incoming and outgoing messages at one place.

If this is not an option, you can create a rule to automatically move sent messages to the inbox or set a default CC/BCC address in the advanced identity settings to send yourself a copy.


(143) Can you add a trash folder for POP3 accounts?

POP3 is a very limited protocol. Basically only messages can be downloaded and deleted from the inbox. It is not even possible to mark a message read.

Since POP3 does not allow access to the trash folder at all, there is no way to restore trashed messages.

Note that you can hide messages and search for hidden messages, which is similar to a local trash folder, without suggesting that trashed messages can be restored, while this is actually not possible.

Version 1.1082 added a local trash folder. Note that trashing a message will permanently remove it from the server and that trashed messages cannot be restored to the server anymore.


(144) How can I record voice notes?

To record voice notes you can press this icon in the bottom action bar of the message composer:

External image

This requires a compatible audio recorder app to be installed. In particular this common intent needs to be supported.

For example this audio recorder is compatible.

Voice notes will automatically be attached.


(145) How can I set a notification sound for an account, folder or sender?

Account:

  • Enable Separate notifications in the advanced account settings (Setup, step 1, Manage, tap account, tap Advanced)
  • Long press the account in the account list (Setup, step 1, Manage) and select Edit notification channel to change the notification sound

Folder:

  • Long press the folder in the folder list and select Create notification channel
  • Long press the folder in the folder list and select Edit notification channel to change the notification sound

Sender:

  • Open a message from the sender and expand it
  • Expand the addresses section by tapping on the down arrow
  • Tap on the bell icon to create or edit a notification channel and to change the notification sound

The order of precendence is: sender sound, folder sound, account sound and default sound.

Setting a notification sound for an account, folder or sender requires Android 8 Oreo or later and is a pro feature.


(146) How can I fix incorrect message times?

Since the sent date/time is optional and can be manipulated by the sender, FairEmail uses the server received date/time by default.

Sometimes the server received date/time is incorrect, mostly because messages were incorrectly imported from another server and sometimes due to a bug in the email server.

In these rare cases, it is possible to let FairEmail use either the date/time from the Date header (sent time) or from the Received header as a workaround. This can be changed in the advanced account settings: Setup, step 1, Manage, tap account, tap Advanced.

This will not change the time of already synchronized messages. To solve this, long press the folder(s) in the folder list and select Delete local messages and Synchronize now.


(147) What should I know about third party versions?

You likely came here because you are using a third party build of FairEmail.

There is only support on the latest Play store version, the latest GitHub release and the F-Droid build, but only if the version number of the F-Droid build is the same as the version number of the latest GitHub release.

F-Droid builds irregularly, which can be problematic when there is an important update. Therefore you are advised to switch to the GitHub release.

The F-Droid version is built from the same source code, but signed differently. This means that all features are available in the F-Droid version too, except for using the Gmail quick setup wizard because Google approved (and allows) one signature only.

Note that you'll need to uninstall the F-Droid build first before you can install a GitHub release because Android refuses to install the same app with a different signature for security reasons.

Note that the GitHub version will automatically check for updates. When desired, this can be turned off in the miscellaneous settings.

Please see here for all download options.

If you have a problem with the F-Droid build, please check if there is a newer GitHub version first.


(148) How can I use an Apple iCloud account?

There is a built-in profile for Apple iCloud, but if needed you can find the right settings here.

When using two-factor authentication you might need to use an app-specific password.


(149) How does the unread message count widget work?

The unread message count widget shows the number of unread messages either for all accounts or for a selected account, but only for the folders for which new message notifications are enabled.

Tapping on the notification will synchronize all folders for which synchronization is enabled and will open:

  • the start screen when all accounts were selected
  • a folder list when a specific account was selected and when new message notifications are enabled for multiple folders
  • a list of messages when a specific account was selected and when new message notifications are enabled for one folder

(150) Can you add cancelling calendar invites?

Cancelling calendar invites (removing calendar events) requires write calendar permission, which will result in effectively granting permission to read and write all calendar events of all calendars.

Given the goal of FairEmail, privacy and security, and given that it is easy to remove a calendar event manually, it is not a good idea to request this permission for just this reason.

Inserting new calendar events can be done without permissions with special intents. Unfortunately, there exists no intent to delete existing calendar events.


(151) Can you add backup/restore of messages?

An email client is meant to read and write messages, not to backup and restore messages. Note that breaking or losing your device, means losing your messages!

Instead, the email provider/server is responsible for backups.

If you want to make a backup yourself, you could use a tool like imapsync.

If you want to import an mbox file to an existing email account, you can use Thunderbird on a desktop computer and the ImportExportTools add-on.


(152) How can I insert a contact group?

You can insert the email addresses of all contacts in a contact group via the three dots menu of the message composer.

You can define contact groups with the Android contacts app, please see here for instructions.


(153) Why does permanently deleting Gmail message not work?

You might need to change the Gmail IMAP settings on a desktop browser to make it work:

  • When I mark a message in IMAP as deleted: Auto-Expunge off - Wait for the client to update the server.
  • When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder: Immediately delete the message forever

Note that archived messages can be deleted only by moving them to the trash folder first.

Some background: Gmail seems to have an additional message view for IMAP, which can be different from the main message view.


(154) Can you add favicons as contact photos?

Besides that a favicon might be shared by many email addresses with the same domain name and therefore is not directly related to an email address, favicons can be used to track you.


(155) What is a winmail.dat file?

A winmail.dat file is sent by an incorrectly configured Outlook client. It is a Microsoft specific file format (TNEF) containing a message and possibly attachments.

You can find some more information about this file here.

You can view it with for example the Android app Letter Opener.


(156) How can I set up an Office 365 account?

An Office 365 account can be set up via the quick setup wizard and selecting Office 365 (OAuth).

If the wizard ends with AUTHENTICATE failed, IMAP and/or SMTP might be disabled for the account. In this case you should ask the administrator to enable IMAP and SMTP. The procedure is documented here.


(157) How can I set up an Free.fr account?

Veuillez voir ici pour les instructions.

SMTP est désactivé par défaut, veuillez voir ici comment il peut être activé.

Veuillez voir ici pour un guide détaillé.


(158) Which camera / audio recorder do you recommend?

To take photos and to record audio a camera and an audio recorder app are needed. The following apps are open source cameras and audio recorders:

To record voice notes, etc, the audio recorder needs to support MediaStore.Audio.Media.RECORD_SOUND_ACTION. Oddly, most audio recorders seem not to support this standard Android action.


(159) What are Disconnect's tracker protection lists?

Please see here for more information about Disconnect's tracker protection lists.

After downloading the lists in the privacy settings, the lists can optionally be used:

  • to warn about tracking links on opening links
  • to recognize tracking images in messages

Tracking images will be disabled only if the corresponding main 'disable' option is enabled.

Tracking images will not be recognized when the domain is classified as 'Content', see here for more information.

This command can be sent to FairEmail from an automation app to update the protection lists:

(adb shell) am startservice -a eu.faircode.email.DISCONNECT.ME

Updating once a week will probably be sufficient, please see here for recent lists changes.


Hilfe

Only the latest Play store version and latest GitHub release are supported. This also means that downgrading is not supported.

Requested features should:

  • be useful to most people
  • not complicate the usage of FairEmail
  • fit within the philosophy of FairEmail (privacy oriented, security minded)
  • comply with common standards (IMAP, SMTP, etc)

Features not fulfilling these requirements will likely be rejected. This is also to keep maintenance and support in the long run feasible.

If you have a question, want to request a feature or report a bug, please use this form.

GitHub issues are disabled due to frequent misusage.

Copyright © 2018-2020 Marcel Bokhorst.