Talk:Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration
Usage statistics about the major mail providers in comparison to general usuage would be interesting. Some unbelievable claims have been made (even on this page).
- The important group of University and institutional providers is missing in the ISP listing of the Goal section. This would fit between "Smaller ISPs" and "Corporate employee accounts". We are talking of frequently >10000 users per institution. An easy (auto)configuration scheme would help Thunderbird's acceptance. Before comming across this page here, I had already commented in Easy Account Setup with collected suggestions on how to simplify the generation of ISP files and extend the manual setup (just replace RDF by XML, or whatever the final format will be, and those statements should still be valid). --Rsx11m 08:51, 22 March 2008 (PDT)
POP vs. IMAP
What do we do when the ISP offers both POP and IMAP? My vote goes for IMAP (hands-down).
- Voting for IMAP, or maybe provide an easy to understand dialog if multiple choices are available. Are there any reasons why somebody would prefer POP over IMAP? You can still work offline with IMAP, so that's not an argument. I mostly see advantages of IMAP over POP in many aspects. --Rsx11m 08:51, 22 March 2008 (PDT)
- Voting for User to Choose. Prefer POP by IMAP when ISP charge you for the storage size. --sam0737 06:57, 17 May 2008 (PDT)
ISP Centric Configuration Discovery
How about creating a "standard" to allow auto-discovery information in DNS TXT field, similar to that of whatever span prevention thing (sorry I forgot the name of that technology)? ISP and Domain owner can then maintain their configuration without submitting changes to every mail client vendor.
- That's Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and I think that the DNS TXT issue is mentioned in item #2 of "Proposal" already(?). Yes, that would need to be standardized in some way, and also has to take into account that the same e-mail address may have different settings depending on where you connect from. --Rsx11m 07:15, 17 May 2008 (PDT)
Web page discovery style with META tag or MicroFormat like OpenID should works equally well.
A lot of things has to the think through like trust, compatibility and flexibility. But I believe this kind of model works better than contributor creating the list. Of course, both technology can exists and implemented at the same time. --sam0737 07:03, 17 May 2008 (PDT)
The proposed solution (contributors creating the list) is a privacy and security risk. Email itself is a security hazard, but this seems worse. Suppose a malicious user M creates a phony server PS which forwards messages to AS (an authentic ISP which is not yet on the list), storing login info and messages and possibly modifying the latter on the way, and then adds it to the list as the server for AS. There we have a perfect undetected Man-in-the-middle attack. --Nabil 19:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
Outlook 2007
Forgive my complete ignorance on this. Outlook 2007 does something similar to all of this. Is there any chance of using the same files/xml-schema/processes for setting up email (creating more of a standard in the process)? It works really well here, but I'm not sure if these autodiscover.xml files are being used or if Outlook is just randomly guessing to find my settings.
