Connect a mailbox from the terminal

What you get: an inbox Quox can triage for you, connected without opening a dashboard, and without the password ever appearing on screen, in a file or in your history.

Connecting a new mailbox creates a credential in the vault, so it needs a human or admin profile, such as one you signed in with quox -p admin login.

1. Connect it

connect a mailbox Copy

# read the password into a variable; -s keeps it off the screen$ read -s -p "IMAP password: " MAILPW; export MAILPW# name the variable, not the value$ quox -p admin mail connect --email ops@example.com \    --imap-host imap.example.com --smtp-host smtp.example.com \    --password-env MAILPW --label "Ops inbox" --name "Ops"# the password has done its job$ unset MAILPW

Commands as quox mail connect --help documents them at 0.3.0.

Using Gmail, iCloud or Outlook? --provider gmail (or icloud, outlook) fills in the hosts and ports for you. Already have the credential in the vault? --credential <id> reuses it, with no password at all. --folders picks which folders to watch.

2. See it connected

connected mailboxes Copy

$ quox mail accountsID                          Email              Name     Polling    Connectedinbacc_mv1iwgdb_2kwmgtyj    ops@example.com    Ops      yes        2026-10-09T22:14:35.999Z

From a real run on our own install. Address and name changed.

Polling yes means Quox is watching the mailbox for new mail.

What just happened

mail connect read the password from the variable you named, stored it in QuoxVault as a new credential, and connected the account to that credential. The account refers to the credential by its id, so the password is not stored with the account, and the vault only ever shows it masked.

Check it yourself

quox vault list shows the new credential, masked. quox vault test <id> checks the connection with it.

Undo

quox mail disconnect <account-id>

That stops the sync and detaches the account. It does not touch the mailbox itself.

Next

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