[BlueOnyx:26552] Re: Dovecot Aliases for email username?

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Taco,

> I believe part of the solution is also setting the zones 
 > for the e-mail domain up with specific SRV records, pointing
 > to a web service that outputs an XML with e-mail server
 > configuration.
 >
> I never looked into this very thoroughly, but maybe the 
 > XML file can also contain the right username (format).

Yeah, Chris Gebhard pointed this out to me recently and somehow I wasn't 
even aware that this feature exists. So I looked it up and it is pretty 
neat.

It seems to work like this:

CNAME DNS record autodiscover.Vsite.com points to 
autodiscover.emailprovider.com

SRV Record autodiscover.emailprovider.com has something like this in it:

Record Type: SRV
Service: _autodiscover
Protocol: _tcp
Port: 443 (or the appropriate port for secure connections)
Priority: 10 (or another priority value)
Weight: 0 (or another weight value)
Target: autodiscover.emailprovider.com

And that tells the Email client to connect to ...

https://autodiscover.emailprovider.com:443

... where it gets a JSON (or XML) file with the information it needs. 
That info could look like this if it were presented in JSON:

{
   "EmailAddress": "user at example.com",
   "IncomingServer": {
     "Type": "IMAP",
     "Hostname": "imap.emailprovider.com",
     "Port": 993,
     "Encryption": "SSL/TLS"
   },
   "OutgoingServer": {
     "Hostname": "smtp.emailprovider.com",
     "Port": 587,
     "Encryption": "STARTTLS"
   },
   "Username": "user",
   "Password": "password",
   "Authentication": "Basic",
   "DisplayName": "User Name"
}

Naturally we won't and can't serve "Username" and "Password" out this 
way, but the above shows that the general mechanism allows it. So in the 
end the user would need to enter the password himself, but the rest 
would auto-configure.

The way I would integrate this is probably have the SRV point to 
https://autodiscover.emailprovider.com:81/ and let the GUI create a JSON 
file with the correct info on the fly.

I have this pretty high on my list of future features for BlueOnyx. But 
right now it's about 1-2 items behind "new and modernized GUI template". 
Work on that is currently going full swing.

Here is an image of an early prototype mock-up of the general look and 
feel. The mobile version also looks pretty neat and has actual usability 
to compared to what we currently have.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber
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