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Autoconfig for Thunderbird clients
Idea shared by Nicolas Fertig - 3/28/2018 at 1:13 AM
Proposed
Hello,
 
We are currently successfully using the autodiscover feature with clients such as Outlook and emClient, that is great.
However it seems there is no support for Autoconfig which is supported by Thunderbird.
Is this something that could be added to SmarterMail ? It would really be a plus.
 
Basically it's the same as Outlook autodiscover (returning an xml with the good values for the e-mail address specified) and shouldn't be very complicated to add since everything is already here for Autodiscover :)
 
What thunderbird tries to lookup:
Try to get the configuration from the email provider
Try to contact http://autoconfig.emailaddressdomain/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=emailaddress , e.g. http://autoconfig.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=fred@example.com, as well as fallback http://example.com/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.xml, and see whether that host/URL exists. The returned file must have the ConfigFileFormat as below.
 
XML FileFormat: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:ConfigFileFormat
Info source: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration
 
 
Hi Nicolas. It is possible to set up autodiscover for Thunderbird. I assisted a customer with it the other day and it is working. This link may help: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration
 
Basically, you need to add an A record for autoconfig along with the A record for autodiscover. Below is an example of a simple DNS zone file (mail entries only) that need to be in place for autodiscover to work with Thunderbird...
 
@    IN MX 10    mail.exampledomain.com.
autodiscover IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
autoconfig IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (this IP should be the same as your autodiscover IP)
_autodiscover._tcp SRV 0 0 443 mail
 
Please let me know if this does not help to get you started. Thanks.
Linda Pagillo
Mail's Best Friend
Email: linda.pagillo@mailsbestfriend.com
Web: www.mailsbestfriend.com
Authorized SmarterTools Reseller
Authorized Message Sniffer Reseller
 
Hi Linda,

Thank you for your reply.

We tried this, except that the autoconfig and autodiscover are CNAME to our SmarterMail server instead of A records.

It works well for autodiscover (outlook, emClient) but not for Thunderbird.

What I understood is that Thunderbird looks for http://autoconfig.<domainname.tld>/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=emailaddress, but it seems that file is not served by SmarterMail. Trying to call it manually throws a 404 error.

On another hand we have a basic "mailcow" setup for another domain, with the same dns entries (except it points to the mailcow mail server) and both autoconfig and autodiscover works out of the box.

I now wonder how you get it working. We are maybe doing something wrong but I can't put the finger on it.
My pleasure Nicolas! Have you tried pointing the autoconfig and autodiscover to an A record instead of a CNAME?
Linda Pagillo
Mail's Best Friend
Email: linda.pagillo@mailsbestfriend.com
Web: www.mailsbestfriend.com
Authorized SmarterTools Reseller
Authorized Message Sniffer Reseller
 
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