Comments on: How should we manage autoconfiguration files?

By: toby

toby — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:20:11 +0000

To support cases where many domains are served by the same mail servers (such as Google Apps, or other hosted services) you could easily look up MX records now, without any action on administrators’ part. There’s no possible way to know all the domains using Google Apps, but if you look up a domain and its MX is google.com or googlemail.com then the rest should be straightforward…

By: Bernd Stroessenreuther

Bernd Stroessenreuther — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:41:30 +0000

Hi David,

what do You think about a completely decentral approach?
The user enters his eMail address only, let’s say geo…@gmail.com, the autoconfig plugin transformes it in a defined way into an URL e. g. http://gmail.com/mailautoconfig?user=george or something like that. This should return an XML file in a defined form which describes how to set up SMTP/POP/IMAP. With this information the autoconfig plugin could do this automatically.

(It’s something like the proxy autoconfiguration.) With this approach every admin has the possibility to provide autoconfig information for his own customers, he can change them when ever he wants to change, and the authentication of the publisher is impicitly given.
Another advantage is, that also many little providers can offer those autoconfig data without having one huge central repository.

For reasons of authentication maybe we could also think about https-URLs.

Maybe in a second step You could ask a central repository, if in the first step an Error 404 (not found) was returned. But in this case I would suggest to ask the user first.

Hope it helps.

Best regard,
Bernd Stroessenreuther

By: James John Malcolm

James John Malcolm — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:59:45 +0000

Why not make it part of AMO?

On the client side (Thunderbird itself) people could search for their ISP’s/Service’s name and optionally select their country from a list.

As Ben proposed (comment 2), anybody could add data for it. Alternatively, groups would be formed to work on (global) coverage of mail settings, maybe like translations are handled?

Also, doesn’t wikipedia have lists of ISPs per country?

By: Renato S. Yamane

Renato S. Yamane — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:43:37 +0000

Hi, autoconfig to @mandic.com.br is not working.
When I run Thunderbird 3B1 in Linux, I try config a account and I need insert ALL fields by hand (imap server, smtp server, etc).
All information about @mandic.com.br is available in more than 6 months ago in spreadsheet available in https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailServerList

By: Eddy Nigg

Eddy Nigg — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:46:28 +0000

Concerning security of the DNS approach: It is equally secure as mail itself. MX records are served by DNS and a compromised DNS server would have the same effect in both instances. It’s currently more likely that the “mailconf” file is served from a secured location (HTTPS) than mail servers actively supporting SSL. There isn’t anything specially new with DNS discovery and if implemented correctly reasonable secure (for settings up mail accounts).

Additionally I wouldn’t like to depend on a centrally managed DB by Mozilla for various reasons. I think it important to be able to change the “mailconf” at will without the need for a third party.

By: Eddy Nigg

Eddy Nigg — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:40:02 +0000

I’d like to see a format that can be supported by any ISP effectively. I don’t think it would be an improvement if only the top five mail providers receive an easy solution – this we have already IIRC.

Implementation of such a protocol should be fairly easy and serve 98% of all mail providers equally. This was the reason for my proposal at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:DNSBasedLookup by mimicking SRV records of XMPP somewhat.

By: seb

seb — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:52:01 +0000

How about something similar to ‘Google Site Map’, e.g. ‘Mozilla email settings’. It could be a xml file hosted by the ISP/mail account provider stating all information needed to set up the accounts.

I’m aware that this would need the ISPs to take this one on but why not… It would enable any client to use the settings.

By: Leni

Leni — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:17:05 +0000

I found a need for some per-domain attributes to support users who sync with a particular domain. So point (2) is right in noting that this isn't just a Thunderbird problem, but I think over time it might be handy if the backend dataset were extensible beyond POP/IMAP/SMTP attributes.

By: david

david — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:22:31 +0000

Patrick: I don’t think there’s any reason we wouldn’t host your ISP’s config file, no matter where you are on the long tail. DNS based approaches might work as well.

By: Ben Bucksch

Ben Bucksch — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:19:13 +0000

Please see the project page, many of the proposals have already been discussed in the newsgroup discussion linked there. Problem with DNS is: 1) insecure (easy to forge) 2) hostname, port is just not enough. We cannot discover all necessary information from the server itself either, e.g. IMAP root folder or email address -> username mapping, which is not standardized and many people have serious problems with. We already give the ISP/company a way to provide us with a config. But there's also a central database for those many ISPs which do not cooperate initially. David A. was asking how we can manage a central database.