Setting up email alerts

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.

The one thing that catches everybody

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.

Where the settings live

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.

Gmail

Turn on 2-Step Verification: Google Account → Security. Without it the app password page does not exist — it will simply not be there.
Go to myaccount.google.com/apppasswords, name it Yardstick, and create it.
Copy the 16 characters. Google shows them in four groups with spaces — the spaces make no difference either way.

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.

Outlook.com and Microsoft 365

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 centre. If that is you, it is under the user's Mail settings, in Manage email apps.

Yahoo Mail

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.

Any other provider

Your provider's help pages will list an SMTP or "outgoing mail" server. What you are looking for:

Port 587 is the usual answer. Use it unless told otherwise.
Port 465 if they say SSL rather than STARTTLS. Both work.
Username is the whole address, not just the part before the @ — a surprising number of providers document it the other way and reject it anyway.
If they offer app passwords, use one. If they do not, your normal password will work.

Your own mail server, or one from your internet provider, usually needs no app password at all — those are the easy ones.

When the test fails

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 spam. Mail from your own address to your own address sometimes lands there the first time; marking it "not spam" once is enough.

Where your password is kept

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.