Setting up Email for Automation

Need your application to send emails, then read this.

For the OpenCanary project I needed to be able to send emails to myself from the device. Originally I used an old Gmail address but as that was used by other purposes I wanted to create a new dedicated address for this purpose.

Here’s how to set it up on a few main(ish) sites:

Yahoo

Okay so not the most current but they do allow email creation with just a contact phone number so this might be of interest.

First go to and create https://login.yahoo.com/ a new account, make sure you keep track of the username and the password you used.

Go into the application you are coding and use the settings:

Username – the full username including the @yahoo.com extention

Password – this we need to set specially, see below:

smtp address – set this to “smtp.mail.yahoo.com”

Port – this will need to be 587

Now go to the account section of the yahoo site for the new mail address, and you will need to go to the account security section.

At the bottom of the page is the “Manage app passwords” section, select this and you will get a new pop up.

Go to select app and choose the “other app” option and give this a suitable name (in my case I used “opencanary” ) then select generate and this will give you a custom password which you can then use in the password section of the code.

Run the code and away you go.

I did note there seems to be some delay between the sending of the mail and it getting through so this may have some filtering going on.

I will add other providers here as I test them.