DanielW’s Blog

In response to How to configure a mail client (no comments there).

Rolf proposes a XML config file standard to quickly setup email accounts in mail clients. I always had the idea of a DNS based auto config system for mail clients. (maybe there is already such a thing?)

It would work like that:

• the user enters his mail address in his mail client i.e. someuser@kde.org
• the client would then ask for a TXT dns record for something like __mailautoconfig.kde.org
• from that record the client would get all needed information (smtp,imap,pop3 servers and so on)
• in best case the user now only needs to enter the password and would be done

Together with the obvious things like smtp/pop3/imap server address and ports, it could contain information about supported encryption and authentication modes and if smtp auth is needed. Also the url of a web mail interface for the mail address could be published.

Very important to make things easy for the user is the “login-field” to store how the login name is created out of the mail address, with values like “address” = complete mail address as username, “user” = only the user part of the mail address or “manual” = the user has to enter his login )

And yes, there are security implications, but the information published over dns that way is  public available  (for bigger mail providers at least) anyway.

So, what do you think? Stupid idea which has already been thought of and thrown away for an obvious reason I’m missing?

(And yes I know that some mail client already have such an auto config feature, but they use their own database (local or over the net) to map mail addresses to settings. Smaller mail services will not get into it and they may not always be up to date.)