Email client autodiscovery

[dan]

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?

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1. Though that’s rather hypocritical of me; if I do get this module built, it will also be largely AI-coded. ↩︎

[MadPatrick]

Hi Dan,

This woul be great if you can get the autodiscovery working
I’m using Sogo, but i don’t know if that makes a difference

If there is some testing needed, i’m willing to help

[stephdl (Stéphane de Labrusse)]

Automatic configuration of email clients​ - WebTop groupware | NethServer 8...

I recall I did some work in webtop, if I can help ping me

[dan]

@stephdl

webtop

If this feature were to be built in to an existing module,^[1] wouldn’t the mail server be a better fit for it? Why Webtop?

But that question aside, your implementation (Feat: autoconfiguration for email clients (#128) · NethServer/ns8-webtop@be95ba2 · GitHub) seems to serve static XML configuration documents, generated when the webtop configuration is saved, while the projects I’m looking at generate those configuration documents dynamically. I’m not sure what difference that makes, though, other than one of these projects would deal with multiple mail domains more easily. Though all three of them can create .mobileconfig profiles for Apple devices, which is a win.

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1. And I think this would be a great idea; a separate “email client autodiscovery” module really seems like kind of a clunky way to handle it. ↩︎

[stephdl (Stéphane de Labrusse)]

mail does not have an http service to serve those files, yes it could have been a global solution but this has not been decided.

[dan]

@stephdl

mail does not have an http service

I thought about that after I posted–good point. Putting this into Mail would require some service to serve those two static files via http, through Traefik, though it could be a minimal server (lighttpd, maybe?). Or, in theory, one of these tools could be included in Mail, serving its dynamically-generated content through Traefik. Obviously that wouldn’t happen without a good bit of testing and validation, though.