Yardstick can email you when your Yarbo goes offline, gets stuck, or loses its position. It sends through your own mail account, to yourself — nothing passes through our servers, and it costs nothing.
Your normal password will not work. Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo all stopped accepting account passwords from programs. You need an app password — a 16-character string the provider generates for one program — and on every one of them you must switch on two-factor authentication first, because app passwords do not exist until you do.
This is not a Yardstick rule and there is no way around it. Any program that sends mail through your account needs one.
In Yardstick, open Settings → Notifications, switch Email on, and fill in Your mail account. Five things:
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Mail server | Your provider's SMTP address — the tables below |
| Port | 587 almost always |
| Username | Your full email address, including the part after the @ |
| App password | The 16 characters from your provider, not your normal password |
| Send alerts to | Where the alerts should arrive — usually the same address |
Then press Save, and Send a test. The test tells you exactly what went wrong if it fails, which is worth more than guessing.
| Mail server | smtp.gmail.com |
| Port | 587 |
| Username | your full Gmail address |
| App password | the 16 characters |
Google shows an app password once. If you lose it, delete that entry and make a new one — there is no way to look it up.
| Mail server | smtp.office365.com |
| Port | 587 |
| Username | your full address |
A personal outlook.com or hotmail.com account needs an app password from account.microsoft.com/security — again, two-factor authentication has to be on first.
A work or school mailbox is different, and this is the one that wastes an afternoon: whoever administers your Microsoft 365 tenant has probably switched SMTP AUTH off, and while it is off no password of any kind will work. You will see this in the error:
5.7.139 Authentication unsuccessful, SMTP AUTH is disabled
That is not something you can fix from your side. An administrator has to enable authenticated SMTP for your mailbox in the Microsoft 365 admin center. If that is you, it is under the user's Mail settings, in Manage email apps.
| Mail server | smtp.mail.yahoo.com |
| Port | 587 |
| Username | your full Yahoo address |
Generate an app password under Account Security → Generate app password. Yahoo calls your normal password an "account key" in places, which is not the same thing and will not work here.
Your provider's help pages will list an SMTP or "outgoing mail" server. What you are looking for:
Your own mail server, or one from your internet provider, usually needs no app password at all — those are the easy ones.
| What it says | What it means |
|---|---|
| 535 / Username and Password not accepted | Almost always your normal password instead of an app password. Check two-factor is on and generate a new one. |
| 5.7.139 SMTP AUTH is disabled | A Microsoft 365 administrator has turned off authenticated SMTP for your mailbox. Only they can turn it back on. |
| Connection refused, or it hangs | Wrong port, or something on your network blocks outgoing mail. Try
465. Some internet providers block port 25 outright —
never use 25 here. |
| Name or service not known | A typo in the mail server address. |
| Sends fine, never arrives | Look in the junk folder. If it is there, see Landing in junk below — marking it "not spam" does not always work, and it is worth knowing why before you try it twenty times. |
Alerts that send successfully but arrive in the junk folder are usually nothing to do with Yardstick, and there are two different causes worth telling apart.
If you signed in with a username and app password — which is how Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo and most providers work — your mail is authenticated and this section almost certainly does not apply to you. Marking one message "not spam" is normally enough.
If you left the username blank and send straight to your own company mail server, your mail arrives unauthenticated, and the receiving server judges it on what it can see. Two things then matter.
The first is the name your machine gives when it connects. Most Linux machines have a short name with no domain on it, and a mail server treats that as suspicious. Yardstick works out a proper name automatically and shows you what it settled on, under This machine's name on the network in Settings → Notifications. Leave it blank unless your machine has a proper name on your network, in which case put it in. Printers and phone systems call the same setting "My Origin" or "hostname".
The second is on the mail server's side, and only an administrator can fix it. Microsoft 365 in particular treats unauthenticated mail claiming to be from your own domain as a possible forgery, and in that case marking it "not spam" has no effect at all, because personal safe-sender lists are deliberately ignored for your own domains. The fix is an inbound connector that recognizes the machine by its IP address, set up once by whoever administers your mail. Microsoft documents this as SMTP relay with a connector, and it is worth doing rather than fighting the junk folder: it takes a couple of minutes and it fixes every device that sends from that address, not just Yardstick.
On your own computer, in Yardstick's settings file, and nowhere else. It is never sent to us, and it is deliberately left out of the diagnostics report — so that report stays safe to email to anybody, including us.
An app password can be revoked at your provider at any time without changing your account password, which is the other reason to use one.