[Proposal] More robust IMAP autodiscovery about wino-mail HOT 3 OPEN

I think you sum up pretty well. As long as we return AutoDiscoverySettings you don't need a lot of changes in the current code.

If you have something better in mind, you may completely discard the existing code and rewrite the module for auto discovery as well. I don't mind it since current implementation lacks a lot of things.

Assigned to @chenseanxy

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Nicely done investigation.

AutoDiscoveryService definitely lacks lots of capabilities right now. I wanted to include Thunderbird Autoconfig at some point but never had the time for it.

This would speed up things for a lot of new users since most of them don't want to search for the IMAP settings they've been offered from their provider.

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I think what we can do, currently, is the plain XML versions of Thunderbird and MSExchange, maybe later on we can add SRV support of both of these.

Implementing both of these should be simple enough:

• Try sending request to multiple possible domains that contain the autodiscovery response (eg, MS: domain.tld or autodiscover.domain.tld, Thunderbird: autoconfig.domain.tld and domain.tld/.well-known)
• On 200, deserialize and return the discovered settings

Now we're introducing multiple sources, there's the consideration about priority:

• MS and Thunderbird admin-defined sources should get higher priority than the central DB / API sources, so admins can override bad info in the centralized sources
• Between MS and thunderbird it shouldn't matter

So to implement this, here's what I'm thinking:

• Every source gets its own model, as well as provider that handles request, timeout, and deserialize logic (try multiple domains), and returns AutoDiscoverySettings
• For AutoDiscoveryService, it awaits the providers one by one according to priority, returns if settings are found
  • maybe parallize? but the providers should be pretty fast, only kinda-slow thing is gonna be cold DNS lookups

If it's OK you can assign this and I'll start working on it this week. (Sorry for writing too much, I'm usually overcautious in new codebases)

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