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Oliver Salzburg
Asked: 2012-09-25 03:29:34 +0800 CST

Does Outlook continue to auto-discover account settings for already configured accounts? Can it be prevented?

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fail2ban just locked me out of our website because something from my desktop was hammering port 443 on the server (which is not in use).

I saw my IP also requesting "GET /autodiscover/autodiscover.xml HTTP/1.1", so I assume that's what's going on on port 443 as well.

But I only have 1 email account configured in Outlook and it's working just fine.

The account is for the address [email protected] and said server will answer for example.com, but that server is not our MX and it is also not configured as an Exchange server in my mail account.

So, why is Outlook still trying to retrieve those auto-configuration settings?

exchange

3 Answers

  1. I know, very old thread, but I stumbled on it. Outlook will try among other things a Root Domain query. Many Websites that have secure certificates will have a wildcard on the certificate.

    So basically what happens if your website root domain and your e-mail root domain are the same, Outlook can send Autodiscovery info to your website hosting provider, and they can get fed up with it.

    Use the GPO settings to disable Root Domain Query

    http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/2212902

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  2. Outlook and activesync devices will autodiscover on each startup. If you leave outlook open, it should not continue to ping that URL unless there is a redirect loop going on. Use a .htaccess file to 301 redirect the link to your exchange server.

    By default, it's going to look at example.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml and also autodiscover.example.com with same path. This works great if you don't use http://example.com for web ( no www. ) but not so well in your case. It is possible that it's not able to reach any of the autodiscover records and so it keeps retrying, so a solution may be to make sure at least one of the expected URLs works. It will check SRV records, but I believe it hits those last.

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  3. As for being able to kill auto-config in Outlook: Do you have a group policy setup to auto-configure outlook? I would check that.

    Also, if your computer is hammering a server without explanation, update and run your anti-virus. If Outlook is already configured with an account, it won't keep trying to auto-configure since the configuration files are already setup. It sounds like there is possibly a malware issue with your computer.

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