What’s the catch?
Right now, Handbill is in beta testing, and it’s a little tricky to set up. Note that this ONLY applies for people who want to install the app, not for any friends of theirs who will be receiving posts through their email. (See How It Works if you don’t understand this distinction.)
If you’re comfortable with multiple email accounts and accessing the settings at your provider’s web site, then doing the stuff below should only take about 5-10 minutes. Sometimes we have to pay the price of convenience in order regain some control…. Just don’t expect to casually download the app when you’re drunk and get it working mindlessly…
You will need an email account to install Handbill. We STRONGLY recommend that you don’t use your primary email account right now. That is, don’t use the email that you use to recover passwords from other services, to receive important messages, and so forth.
(If you don’t know what an email account is, then you won’t be able to set up Handbill without help. If the process below sounds overwhelming or super confusing to you, you should probably get help then too).
So, below is the process. Note that you will only have to do this ONCE, in order to install and connect the app. After that, you can just open the app and use it.
Technically, it should work fine with your primary email, but there are two possible dangers:
It could delete or move something it shouldn’t due to an unknown bug.
Your service could flag you as a spammer and DEACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT. You might be able to get it reactivated, but who knows? Handbill mail is not spam… users consent to receive it. But you will need to explain that to the customer service (?) at google or wherever. We haven’t seen this happen yet, but we have zero control over it, and you’re on your own if it happens.
So, it’s probably a good idea to use a secondary account. For this you have two options:
Use an older account which you don’t care about much.
Get a new account. Various services allow this easily, such as gmail.
Once you have your secondary account, you will need to be able to log into it. For security reasons, most modern email providers will not let you log into your account using custom software unless you have something called an “app-specific password”. This is different from your normal service password (for instance, the one you use to log into gmail from the web or your phone).
The process for getting an app-specific password is usually not too bad, but it’s different for each provider (yahoo, gmail, iCloud, etc). In general, you will need to do one or two things:
If “two factor authentication” isn’t already on for your secondary account, you will need to turn it on.
You will need to generate an “app-specific password” to connect Handbill to that account. This usually means going to the web site of the provider, filling in a single field, and clicking a button. The details are provided by the Handbill app for each provider.
Why don’t we just implement something like the “Connect to your account using Google” button that some web sites and apps offer? We probably will… it just takes a few thousand dollars and a few weeks for a code review. If enough people want it, we will do this, but it will probably only work with gmail and possibly with some Microsoft accounts.
One final complication. Since Handbill is currently in beta, you will need to send us the email address you use to get apps (from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store) so we can add you to the list of testers. Note that this is PROBABLY a different address than the one you will use for your Handbill email account, so don’t get confused by this. Once the app is approved by the stores for full distribution, this problem will disappear.
One final note. During install, you will be asked to create a cryptographic passphrase in order to activate the encryption. This is NOT an account password… it is simply used to scramble the keys which keep your messages secure. Just be aware that you should keep track of both your app-specific password and your passphrase if you ever want to use your account from another phone.
So, sorry about all that.