autoconfig

Name

autoconfig — Thunderbird AutoConfig protocol

Description

AutoConfig is a HTTP-based discovery protocol, originally introduced for Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 in 2009. It is quite similar to autodiscover(7). This manual page is not normative.

TB tries a bunch of URLs, with HTTP GET:

  • https://autoconfig.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=user@example.com

  • http://autoconfig.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=user@example.com

  • https://example.com/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=user@example.com

  • http://example.com/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=user@example.com

  • DNS SRV lookups are not performed.

Note that TLS wildcard certificates do not extend to more than one level; for example, if the e-mail address is `foo@m1.example.com`, and the m1 host presents a server certificates for `CN=example.com, subjAltName=*.example.com`, clients that are trying to download `autoconfig.m1.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml` may fail TLS verification. The Thunderbird setup wizard does not show TLS failures, and silently treats it as an unavailable resource.

TB also performs AutoDiscover.

config-v1.1.xml

incomingServers may be of type "imap", "pop3", "nntp" or "exchange".

See also

gromox(7), autodiscover(7)