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    email: autoconfig for autoconfiguration (example: via thunderbird)

    Feature Requests
    email thunderbird
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    • valkalon
      valkalon last edited by girish

      Hi guys, I'm a standard cloudron subscription user.

      I've just set up emails using cloudron everything worked perfectly. I had to setup email server and experienced the pain it can be to have everything working smoothly and secure. Thank you so much for taking car of all the hassle with the cloudron, it's amazing 🙂

      Question: I'm using Thunderbird and it was not able to automatically detect cloudron settings, I had to set it up manually. i'm tech savvy so it's fine by me, it won't be the same though for family and friends.

      Is there any chance that you would add autoconfig to the email part of cloudron so that thunderbird (and equivalent mail client) would automatically find the configuration?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
      • subven
        subven last edited by

        This works with a service subdomain + SRV record and is AFAIK not implemented in Cloudron yet.

        Ressources:

        • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/exchange_server_protocols/ms-oxdisco/d912502b-c0e2-41a1-8b0e-f714ba523e08
        • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration
        • https://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=661
        • http://web.archive.org/web/20120828065248/http://moens.ch/2012/05/31/providing-email-client-autoconfiguration-information/
        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • girish
          girish Staff last edited by

          This is in our TODO list: https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/issues/556 . I have added @subven suggestion there now.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • valkalon
            valkalon last edited by

            Understood thanks a lot!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • valkalon
              valkalon last edited by valkalon

              I had autoconfig setup for business emails before cloudron. Here is the process I used:

              Let's say you have the following domains:
              test.com: The domain for which you want to have email autoconfig
              my.test.com: The URL of your cloudron server that manages your email and will broadcast the autoconfig configuration.

              setup DNS entries in the test.com DNS

              // entry for outlook (never tested since I only use thunderbird)
              _autodiscover._tcp 600 IN SRV 0 0 443 my.test.com
              // entry for thunderbird and others
              autoconfig 600 IN CNAME my.test.com
              smtp 600 IN CNAME my.test.com
              imap 600 IN CNAME my.test.com

              // autoconfig.test.com does not need an SSL certificate
              // smtp.test.com, imap.test.com must have an active SSL certificate

              Create the mail directory and autoconfig file

              in the webroot for autoconfig.test.com create the file

              mail/config-v1.1.xml

              Content of mail/config-v1.1.xml

              // Here is a sample:

              <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
              
              <clientConfig version="1.1">
                <emailProvider id="my.test.com">
                  <domain>test.com</domain> 
                  <domain>another-domain.com</domain>
                  <displayName>test.com</displayName>
                  <displayShortName>Test</displayShortName>
                  <incomingServer type="imap">
                    <hostname>imap.test.com</hostname>
                    <port>993</port>
                    <socketType>SSL</socketType>
                    <authentication>password-cleartext</authentication>
                    <username>%EMAILADDRESS%</username>
                  </incomingServer>
                  <outgoingServer type="smtp">
                    <hostname>smtp.test.com</hostname>
                    <port>587</port>
                    <socketType>STARTTLS</socketType>
                    <authentication>password-cleartext</authentication>
                    <username>%EMAILADDRESS%</username>
                  </outgoingServer>
                </emailProvider>
              </clientConfig>
              

              Nginx config

              since autoconfig does not require any SSL certificate you can setup any autoconfig request to match the same config file. For cloudron it might be better to have one config file per domain?

              server {
                listen 80;
                server_name
                autoconfig.*;
              
                root /var/www/autoconfig.test.com;
                access_log /var/log/nginx/autoconfig.test.com/access.log;
                error_log /var/log/nginx/autoconfig.test.com/error.log warn;
              
                location / {
                  try_files $uri $uri/;
                }
              }
              

              Aside note

              in theory you should be able to not use imap.test.com and smtp.test.com, in practice though, I had trouble with thunderbird not recognizing the autoconfig without those 2 domains setup (it was 1 year ago, maybe it changed since)

              Hope it helps! I'll be happy to assist implementing if interested 😉

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • girish
                girish Staff last edited by

                I have put instructions how to setup autoconfig for Thunderbird and Outlook here - https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/#autodiscover . I tested Thunderbird and that works well. I couldn't test Outlook because it seems old Outlook is not downloadable anymore and Outlook 365 uses some undocumented autodiscover.json method these days.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • valkalon
                  valkalon last edited by

                  Awesome Girish thanks a lot !

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • subven
                    subven last edited by subven

                    Very nice to see this finally beeing resolved and documentated. Thank you a lot @valkalon and @girish 🙂

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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