Connect guide

Connect Alibaba Cloud Mail to Perplexity

Updated 1 November 2026

Yes — Perplexity can read, search and reply to your Alibaba Cloud Mail through Mailopoly. Connect Alibaba Cloud Mail to Mailopoly over IMAP with your mailbox password, add Mailopoly to Perplexity as a custom connector, sign in and ask. One connection covers Alibaba Cloud Mail and every other account you own. Alibaba Cloud Mail is an organisation mailbox, so your administrator may need to allow IMAP before it will connect.

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This guide also covers Aliyun Enterprise Mail and qiye.aliyun.com — the steps are the same.

Before you start

A Mailopoly account — 7-day free trial, no credit card.
Alibaba Cloud Mail is an organisation mailbox, so your administrator may need to allow IMAP before it will connect.
Perplexity Pro, Max or Enterprise — custom connectors aren't on the free plan. On Enterprise, an admin allows custom connectors first.

Connect Alibaba Cloud Mail to Perplexity in three steps

1 Connect Alibaba Cloud Mail to Mailopoly

Start a Mailopoly account at mailopoly.com/sign-up — 7-day free trial, no credit card.
In Mailopoly choose Add email account and enter your full Alibaba Cloud Mail address.
Enter your mailbox password. Mailopoly fills in the server settings for you.

Provider help: Alibaba Cloud Mail help (Chinese) ↗

2 Add Mailopoly to Perplexity

This part is the same whatever you connected in step 1.

Add Mailopoly to Perplexity

These steps are taken from public documentation, and we haven't yet checked each one in Perplexity ourselves. If a label doesn't match what you see, Perplexity's own help page, linked below, has the current wording.

In Perplexity, open Account settings → Connectors.
Choose + Custom connector at the top right, then Remote.
Name it Mailopoly and enter https://fastapi.prod.aws.mailopoly.com/mcp-server/ as the MCP Server URL. For Authentication choose OAuth 2.0 — there's no client ID or secret to fill in, Mailopoly registers Perplexity itself — and for Transport choose Streamable HTTP.
Tick the box confirming you understand the risks of custom connectors, choose Add, then click the Mailopoly card to sign in.
Sign in with your Mailopoly account, then choose what Perplexity is allowed to do. Reading, making changes and sending are separate permissions.
Back in Perplexity, ask.

Perplexity takes Mailopoly as a custom remote connector, so the only thing to paste is one address. Custom connectors are available on Perplexity Pro, Max and Enterprise; on Enterprise, an admin has to allow them for the organisation first.

Adding custom remote connectors — Perplexity Help Center ↗

3 Ask about your Alibaba Cloud Mail

Whatever you've connected to Mailopoly is what your assistant can reach. Some things people ask on day one:

Summarise my Alibaba Cloud Mail Cleanbox for today.
Find the purchase order in my work mail and tell me the total.
Draft a reply to the last customer email from my work address.

Alibaba Cloud Mail server settings

Mailopoly fills these in for you when you enter your address. They're here in case you need to check them or your provider uses something unusual.

IMAP server	imap.qiye.aliyun.com
Port	993
Security	SSL/TLS
Username	Your full email address
Password	Your mailbox password

What Perplexity can do with Alibaba Cloud Mail through Mailopoly

Search Alibaba Cloud Mail — and every other account you own — in one question. By sender, date, topic, or the half-remembered phrase somewhere in the body.
Read your Cleanbox, not your whole inbox. Mailopoly sorts Alibaba Cloud Mail as it arrives: personal and important mail in Cleanbox, promotions and newsletters in Other. Ask for either.
Summarise a thread, a day or a week. "What did the school send this week?" comes back as an answer, not a list of links.
Reply from your Alibaba Cloud Mail address, in your voice. Save a draft to Mailopoly for review, or send — sending is a separate permission and a confirm-first action.
Schedule a send for later, and cancel it if you change your mind.
Pull out invoices, events and deliveries. Amounts and due dates, calendar invitations, parcel tracking — extracted on arrival and added to My Day.
Find an attachment. Every attachment from Alibaba Cloud Mail lands in PolyBox, so "find the PDF the accountant sent" just works.
Unsubscribe, snooze, file and mark read from the chat, on whichever account the mail belongs to.

Reading, making changes and sending are separate permissions you grant when you connect, and you can revoke Perplexity at any time from Settings → Security in the Mailopoly app. More on the security page.

What goes wrong with Alibaba Cloud Mail, and the fix

Your administrator controls IMAP. On an organisation domain, IMAP access can be switched off centrally.
Use your full email address as the username, not just the part before the @.
If two-factor authentication is on, your normal password will be refused and you'll need an app password from your provider's security settings.
No + Custom connector button in Perplexity: custom connectors need Perplexity Pro, Max or Enterprise. On Enterprise, ask your admin to allow custom connectors for the organisation.
The Mailopoly card says it isn't connected: adding the connector doesn't sign you in. Click the Mailopoly card in Account settings → Connectors and finish the Mailopoly sign-in.
Perplexity can't reach the server: check the address is exactly https://fastapi.prod.aws.mailopoly.com/mcp-server/, Authentication is OAuth 2.0 and Transport is Streamable HTTP, then remove the connector and add it again.