email: autoconfig for autoconfiguration (example: via thunderbird)

[valkalon]

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?

[subven]

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/

[girish]

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

[valkalon]

Understood thanks a lot!

[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

[girish]

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.

[valkalon]

Awesome Girish thanks a lot !

[subven]

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