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Whisk
Asked: 2010-08-20 05:12:17 +0800 CST

How to configure email autoconfiguration for a domain?

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Outlook and a number of other email clients now feature autodiscovery of mail server settings and it bugs me that I don't have this set up for our domains, but I'm not sure how to do it and a quick google hasn't turned up anything. I presume it's done with some kind of SRV record in DNS - is this correct and if so what's the correct format?

domain-name-system email outlook dns-server

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I am sorry I might be late to the party here. If you are still looking for a solution, I spent a weekend figuring out how to provide Auto Configuration (autodiscover what Outlook 2010 calls it) for most popular email clients including iOS.

    I wrote it all down in a blog post here: http://moens.ch/2012/05/31/providing-email-client-autoconfiguration-information/ (also available via archive.org)

    Outlook 2010 actually does a combination of DNS lookup and XML config. It first does a SRV lookup for _autodiscover._tcp.<yourdomain> and then does an xml POST request to your autodiscover url and expects an XML response. My post contains samples of the XML response and a link to the full autodiscover xml Response spec on MS technet.

    In short: You can provide full autodiscover functionality to your users even without Exchange server.

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  2. RFC 6186 describes how to use SRV records for e-mail services. Summary:

    • SRV records like _submission._tcp SRV 0 1 587 mail.example.com. and _pop3, _pop3s, _imap, _imaps. (Last number is the port number.)
    • When offering both IMAP and POP, use the first number to show which is preferred (lower is preferable).

    I don't know which MUA's already implement this. Maybe KMail. Thunderbird not yet?

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  3. So far as I know, the (Outlook) feature requires Exchange 2007 or later.

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