POP3 server

Mailpit can run a POP3 server, allowing you to download captured messages into your email client. By default, it runs on port 1110 and does not use encryption. However, the port can be set with --pop3 <interface>:<port>, and SSL/TLS encryption can also be enabled (see below).

Notes about the POP3 server

1. Messages deleted via POP3 by the client are also deleted from the Mailpit server.
2. Downloading messages will not mark those messages as read in Mailpit.
3. For performance reasons, only the latest 100 messages are available via POP3. If this is a problem for you and you have a valid reason for accessing more, please open an issue on GitHub to discuss this further.
4. The POP3 server will run either unencrypted or using SSL/TLS encryption, but not both.

Adding POP3 authentication

To enable the POP3 server, a valid password file must be provided with the startup flag --pop3-auth-file <file> or the MP_POP3_AUTH_FILE=<file> environment variable. Alternatively, you can set the MP_POP3_AUTH environment variable (only) to provide a space-separated list of credentials (see below).

To run Mailpit with POP3 authentication:

mailpit --pop3-auth-file /path/to/password-file

Setting via environment

You can optionally export the MP_POP3_AUTH environment variable with a space-separated list of your credentials, e.g., MP_POP3_AUTH="user1:password1 user2:password2". For security reasons, this option is not available as a CLI flag.

Enabling SSL/TLS POP3

By default, the POP3 server runs unencrypted on port 1110. If you wish to enable SSL/TLS encryption, you must provide both the TLS certificate and key:

mailpit \
--pop3-auth-file /path/to/password-file \
--pop3-tls-cert /path/to/cert.pem \
--pop3-tls-key /path/to/key.pem

Certificates can be either self-signed/generated or official certificates (if you have a valid domain name) obtained from sources like Let’s Encrypt.

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