Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration

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Subpages

• UI proposals
• File format for config files
• DNS TXT-based ISP config lookup
• Security considerations

Current situation

Most people are using webmail these days, mainly because it's so easy. You only need to know the URL (usually linked from the provider's homepage) and email address and password, and there's your inbox already. ISPs, although all of them provide POP/IMAP, are leading users to webmail because of that ease of use (and free mail providers do so for the advertizing revenue).

The Thunderbird account setup wizard requires knowledge of a lot of technical settings, most of which users have no clue what they mean nor where to get this information (even if it's provided readily by the ISP).

Goal

Make my non-tech friends use Thunderbird, by making it dead-simple to set up. I.e. make it easy for as many users as possible to get a working Thunderbird configuration.

Ideally, setting up Thunderbird should be as easy as download/install and entering real name, email address and password. The Account Setup Wizard consists of only one screen.

• Major Goals
  • Require only the minimal upfront information from most people
    • Name, Email address, Password
  • Provide and offer preset configurations for at least all large ISPs
• Important Goals
  • Set of configurations can be extended and updated
  • Reduce the number of account wizard steps as much as possible
  • Reduce overall distractions for normal case (distractions = text and clutter, things not understandable or needed by most users)
  • Increase the prominence of the Email account choice
  • Don't add complexity/confusion with this
• Possible Goals
  • Shared system for community to submit, edit, and publish configurations
  • Allow people to publish working configurations peer to peer via email

Assumptions

• User Segmenting
  • Large ISPs (google, msn, yahoo, etc.)
    • Set of users is very large
    • Set of ISPs is small
  • Smaller ISPs
    • Set of users is moderate-sized
    • Set of ISPs is large
  • Corporate employee accounts
    • Set of users per server is small, accumulated very large
    • Set of providers and server implementations is very large and diverse
  • Personal Servers
    • Set of users per server is tiny (1-20), accumulated very small
    • Set of providers and server implementations is very large and diverse

Proposal

In the Account Setup wizard, if the "Email account" radio button is selected (which is the default), 3 text fields are visible and enabled: real name, email address and password.

Email address is properly syntax-checked, and the existance of the domain in DNS is checked.

The domain if the email address is used to determine the configuration (POP/IMAP and SMTP server names, SSL yes/no, authentication methods etc.), via several mechanisms:

1. The legacy rdf files in <installdir>/isp/, like we have for Google Mail right now. (This may be dropped in favor of the next steps.)
2. Try to contact a mail configuration server of the provider
   • E.g. define an DNS TXT record or similar on domain example.net (for my.account@example.net) which contains an URL like https://mailconfig.example.net/mozilla.xml . A similar, but slightly different proposal is described in detail on DNSBasedLookup.
   • Alternatively, just try to contact https://autoconfig.emailaddressdomain/mail/mozilla.xml?emailaddress=emailaddress and see whether that host/URL exists.
   • That file contains the mail configuration. Content is described on ConfigFileFormat.
3. If the email provider does not provide the configuration, we try to find it at a Mozilla server
   • Fetch https://autoconfig.mozillamessaging.com/mail.xml?domain=emailaddressdomain. (Email address of user is not passed, otherwise Mozilla would have a list of email addresses of all users.)
   • This service will have the configuration for all the major ISPs and email providers, so there's a 90+% hit rate
   • It will not work for corporate email accounts.
   • If a provider disagrees with a setting there, it can override the configuration by simply providing the config server in step 2.
4. If the config file contains values to be filled in by the user, specifically a username which is independent from the email address, there's a screen inserted that provides fields for this.
5. Other ways, esp. for corporate email accounts? Avoid heuristics and trail&error!
6. If all fails, we ask the user to enter the configuration, using the existing wizard.

If we could find a configuration, we're done already, with that one screen.

The password dialog does not need to come up either, as the password has already been entered by the user and the wizard filled it in using the password manager.

We should also provide an option to ignore the autoconfig and go into manual config, e.g. using an extra radio button "Email account, manual configuration" (this works exactly like the current "Email account" option) in addition to the new "Email account" option which does the automatic config.

+--------------------------------------------------+
| *Account Setup*                                  |
|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
| (o) E-Mail account                               |
|                                                  |
|      Full name:      [                         ] |
|      E-Mail address: [                         ] |
|      Password:       [                         ] |
|                                                  |
|      [ ] Manual configuration                    | 
|                                                  |
| ( ) RSS News Feeds and Blogs                     |
| ( ) Newsgroup account                            |
| ( ) Calendar                                     |
|                                                  |
|                       [ Cancel ]  [ Next/Done ]  |
+--------------------------------------------------+

(This is only an example for better understanding, see UI page for more info.)

Related Information

The newsgroup discussion is at news://news.mozilla.org:119/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird (Subject: Proposal: Auto-configuration, Date: 2008-03-04)

There's related information on "Thunderbird ISP hooks" at http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Thunderbird_ISP_hooks.