Autodiscover Settings

What Autodiscover is and what it is used for

Autodiscover is a protocol that allows email clients (such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or Microsoft Outlook) to automatically configure the server connection settings for your email address, instead of configuring all parameters manually. This will certainly save you time, especially if you need to configure many accounts.

To use the autodiscover system, you must make sure that your client supports this feature, as not all email clients currently support it fully. You must also update your domain's DNS configuration to add some parameters that will allow you to contact the autodiscover service correctly.

Setting up autodiscover for your domain certainly makes the initial email account setup easier for users and eliminates any errors when entering parameters. It is also a very simple configuration to perform and has no additional cost or performance impact.

Qboxmail's Autodiscover implementation provides IMAP and SMTP settings for desktop email clients and Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync settings for smartphones.

Compatibility

Not all email clients are currently compatible with all protocols. Below is the list of clients for which autodiscover works correctly and the type of protocol used for automatic configuration:

Setting up Autodiscover via VirtualHost

To ensure full compatibility with the various email clients, you need to create a VirtualHost on your own server associated with your domain, in the form autodiscover.mycompany.com, with a valid SSL certificate installed. Inside the created VirtualHost, it is sufficient to add a 302 redirect to the Qboxmail autodiscover server.

Below is an example virtualhost with redirect rules:

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName autodiscover.mycompany.com
  ServerAlias autoconfig.mycompany.com

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^.*config-v1\.1\.xml$ https://autodiscover.qboxmail.com/thunderbird.php [NC,R=302,L]
  RewriteRule ^.*autodiscover\.xml$ https://autodiscover.qboxmail.com/outlook.php [NC,R=302,L]
  RewriteRule ^.*autodiscover\.json$ https://autodiscover.qboxmail.com/outlook.json.php [NC,R=302,L]

  SSLEngine on
  SSLCertificateFile /path/to/ssl.cert
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/ssl.key
</VirtualHost>

Alternatively, if you cannot modify the virtualhost directly, it is sufficient to create an .htaccess file to place in the document root of your autodiscover.mycompany.com domain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*config-v1\.1\.xml$ https://autodiscover.qboxmail.com/thunderbird.php [NC,R=302,L]
RewriteRule ^.*autodiscover\.xml$ https://autodiscover.qboxmail.com/outlook.php [NC,R=302,L]
RewriteRule ^.*autodiscover\.json$ https://autodiscover.qboxmail.com/outlook.json.php [NC,R=302,L]

Setting up Autodiscover via DNS records

If you cannot create a VirtualHost in HTTPS, you can configure autodiscover through a configuration on the domain's DNS. However, it is important to remember that this configuration may not be sufficient to make autodiscover compatible with your email client. Access the DNS management panel of the provider where you registered the domain and add the following CNAME records as shown:

The setting above authorizes your email client to contact Qboxmail's autodiscover service to obtain the mail server configuration data for your domain.

After adding the records listed above, it may take up to 24 hours before the DNS change is fully operational.

Verifying the correct setup of records for autodiscover

To verify the correct setup of the records for autodiscover on your domain, you can run the following nslookup commands from the terminal:

nslookup -q=cname autoconfig.mycompany.com
nslookup -q=cname autodiscover.mycompany.com

which should return respectively:

autoconfig.mycompany.com canonical name = autodiscover.qboxmail.com.
autoconfig.mycompany.com canonical name = autodiscover.qboxmail.com.