So no promises on any timeline, but I am wanting to build a NS8 module to auto-configure email clients. I’d built nethserver-automx for NS7, but automx is now dead and gone, and I’m looking at a few possible replacements:
- GitHub - rseichter/automx2: Mail User Agent (email client) configuration made easy · GitHub seems to be the natural successor to automx, so kind of the obvious choice. It has a history of active maintenance, though it does look like only one dev, and he doesn’t accept contributions/PRs. Some curious design decisions, most notably that it stores most of its configuration in a database, so you need at least a SQLite database for that purpose. I guess this makes sense in a much larger environment, but with a single mail server and no more than a handful of domains, it really seems like overkill for NS8.
- GitHub - croessner/automx · GitHub also uses the automx name, and claims to be developed “in collaboration with” sys4, who developed automx in the first place, as I recall. Text-based config is a plus; being a very new, largely AI-coded project is somewhat of a negative.[1] Currently marked as beta, though I don’t really know what that means in this context (because a great deal of F/OSS spends much of its life in beta or other prerelease states).
- GitHub - solarssk/mail-autodiscover: Lightweight Outlook Autodiscover, Thunderbird Autoconfig and Apple Mail profile service for self-hosted mail servers. · GitHub is a newer project yet, and also seems to be largely AI-coded. Implementation seems likely to be a bit simpler, one of the larger differences being that it doesn’t support any LDAP lookup at all of user information.
One thing I’m trying to figure out is whether the LDAP lookup even matters. In theory, automx could have looked up names given the email address, but I never did get that to work. It could be used to validate whether an account exists, but that also leaks information that you might not want to leak for the sake of security.
So, in an NS8 environment, is there anything I’d really need to look up per-user from the accounts provider?
Though that’s rather hypocritical of me; if I do get this module built, it will also be largely AI-coded. ↩︎