An email program (sometimes called a client or application/app) is software that runs on your computer or mobile device and accesses your email accounts for you. Common examples of email programs are Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail or Windows Live Mail.  This is not the same as accessing your email using our webmail system.

If you want to access your Runbox email account using one of these programs you will need to set it up with  our email server settings.  Most programs have some kind of set up “wizard” that guides you through the process of setting up a new email account. Sometimes the program can work out the details it needs by itself or by using the auto-configure information on our system. Other times you might need (or want) to put that information in yourself manually.

Email programs can usually access and download your email in two ways, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) or POP (Post Office Protocol). When the program sends email it will use SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). You might see these different setting names in your email program which is why we have mentioned them here.

We strongly recommend you use IMAP to access your email as this means both incoming and outgoing email are stored on our system along with other things like the status of your messages (flagged, replied to, forwarded). This means wherever you access your email from it will appear the same way to you.

We have set up guides that will help you set up a number of commonly used email programs.

If you need more help in deciding whether to use POP or IMAP, we have further information on our Deciding whether to use POP or IMAP page.