iCloud, Yahoo and Fastmail users: how to get your receipts into one library

Most receipt-automation guides are written as if everyone's mail lives in Gmail. Plenty of it doesn't — iCloud comes free with an iPhone, Yahoo accounts have been collecting subscription receipts since 2009, and Fastmail is where people go when they get serious about email. All of them can feed a single receipt library. There are two routes: connect the mailbox, or forward out of it.

Route 1: Connect the mailbox over IMAP

iCloud, Yahoo and Fastmail all speak IMAP, the standard protocol for reading a mailbox remotely. The Paper Keep connects to any of them (and to custom servers — your own domain, your hosting provider's mail) and scans for receipt-shaped emails on a schedule, the same way its Gmail integration does.

The one piece of setup friction: none of these providers want you handing out your real password, so each has app-specific passwords — a generated password that grants mail access only and can be revoked on its own:

• iCloud — sign in at account.apple.com → Sign-In and Security → App-Specific Passwords. (Apple requires two-factor authentication to be on, which for a modern Apple ID it already is.)
• Yahoo — Yahoo account security → Generate app password.
• Fastmail — Settings → Privacy & Security → Integrations / App passwords, and choose an IMAP-only scope.

You paste the generated password in once during setup; it's stored encrypted and used only to read mail. During setup you also pick which folders to scan — the whole inbox works fine, but if your mail rules already sort receipts into a folder, pointing the scanner at just that folder gives you the cleanest possible feed. The click-by-click walkthrough is in the IMAP docs, with provider-specific pages for iCloud, Yahoo and Fastmail.

Once connected, the first import backfills history and ongoing scans pick up new receipts automatically — nothing to remember, no rules to maintain.

Route 2: Forward receipts out with a rule

If you'd rather not connect the mailbox at all, every one of these providers can forward matching mail to another address — and that address can be a receipt service's ingest address or simply a dedicated mailbox you keep for receipts.

• Fastmail is the best of the lot here: full support for Sieve, a proper filtering language. A ten-line script forwards anything with a receipt-shaped subject. We publish a ready-to-paste one in the forwarding docs.
• Yahoo — Settings → More settings → Filters. One condition per filter, so create a few: subject contains receipt, subject contains invoice, subject contains order confirmation.
• iCloud — rules live at iCloud.com Mail (gear icon → Settings → Rules), with a "forward to" action. The rules run server-side, so they work even with your Mac asleep — unlike rules built in the Mail app itself, which only fire while Mail is open.

Forwarding's virtue is control: nothing reads your mailbox, and only what matches the rule leaves it. Its cost is coverage — a subject-line rule always misses a few vendors, and it can't backfill the receipts already sitting in your archive the way an IMAP connection's first import can.

Mixing providers is the normal case

The typical household isn't on one provider anyway: an iCloud address on the phone, an old Yahoo account that still receives the electricity bill, a Gmail somewhere, maybe a Fastmail for the sole-trader side gig. The point of both routes is that they all land in the same library — connect some, forward from others, and stop caring which inbox a receipt originally arrived in. (For the family version of this problem, see one family, five inboxes.)

Which route to pick

Connect the inbox if you want backfilled history and zero maintenance. Forward if you want minimal access granted and don't mind tuning a rule. Both are supported, both feed the same archive, and switching later is painless — dedupe catches anything that arrives twice.

This works even better inside The Paper Keep — start a 14-day free trial.