23728 - [meta] Mail proxy support

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[Brad Nixon]

Mozilla's mail client currently does not support proxy servers. This is
something that would be really useful for a lot of people and something I would
like to see. Considering that Outlook Express can't do it at this point, I think
it would be a major competetive checklist feature.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

Hey Phil, do you think this is something that should be post 5.0?

Comment 2

[Phil Peterson]

Moving onto the help wanted list

Comment 3

[Phil Peterson]

Reassign to [e-mail]

Comment 4

[Nathan Kirkham]

Is this something that won't be done for some time ? If 5.0 doesn't have it I
won't be able to ditch 4.7.  It is frustrating to not be able to use the mail
application because it lacks this feature.

Comment 5

[Phil Peterson]

Oh, boy, I hate to sound dumb, but here I go...

I didn't know 4.x had proxy support for mail. I knew we could do it for news,
but I wouldn't consider that high priority. How do you proxy POP or IMAP in 4.x?

On the helpwanted bugs, they are bugs/features that Netscape isn't promising to
write. They're intended to be a "to do list" that mozilla contributors can pick
from, if they don't already have an area of contribution in mind.

Comment 6

[Nathan Kirkham]

Just to let people know there is a little app called SocksCap
http://www.socks.nec.com/sockscap.html
This wraps an app and sends all TCP messages via a proxy server, negating the
need for one to be implemented in the application itself.  I have just used
mozilla without any proxy settings to read web pages and more importantly to
send and receive mail via a SOCKS proxy server.

Comment 7

[Bruce Robson]

Is this a duplicate of bug 16103 "Can't browse behind a SOCKS firewall"

Comment 8

[Phil Peterson]

This seems like the mail version of that bug. Unless rpotts is feeling
particularly magnanimous, I don't expect him to do more than the HTTP side of SOCKS.

Comment 9

[lchiang]

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44995 may be related

Comment 10

[[e-mail]]

Phil,

I never could get it in writing when I supported Proxy Server for Netscape, but
I am 99% sure that the SOCKS setting did not affect ANY mail related functions
in Comm4. This includes: LDAP, POP, IMAP, and SMTP.

I don't really know how important SOCKS support for mail is to corporate
customers, because the overall architecture of mail systems fixes a lot of the
networking that SOCKS addresses. SMTP is store and forward, so admin just put a
relay in front of the firewall. IMAP and POP are received from a single source,
so mail vendors have added what is essentially reverse-proxy features to their
products. 

Comment 11

[Stephen Rasku]

I know that I can get my e-mail through the firewall with Netscape 4.72 by
configuring SOCKS.  I can't do this with Mozilla.

Comment 12

[[e-mail]]

I retract my comments about Communicator support. I never did test this after
4.5x, maybe it worked in late versions (or always worked).

There is a patch in the bug Lisa referenced, which is not checked in. Should we
mark this a dupe?

Comment 13

[[e-mail]]

changed summary to make this the parent "meta" bug for all things relating to
proxy connectivity with mail+news modules.

As best I can tell, none of the relevant functionality is in Netscape 6.0 or
6.01, so this is should be considered an RFE. I have summarized the proxy
support I have reporduced here:

http://www.packetgram.com/pktg/docs/nscp/ns6/ns6proxy.html

---
Proxy support comes in two major flavors: application level and circuit level.

Application level support requires the actual network service's protocol (SMTP,
IMAP, POP, NNTP, etc.)to have support for a proxy mechanism.

This does not exist for mailnews (and probably is a bad idea). This is discussed
in bug 60744.

Circuit level proxy support comes in two primary flavors, based on the
"connection" protocol (there is no categoization for these things that I know of).

SSL Tunnel (SSL Proxy) - actually as nothing to do with SSL, but traditionally
used to tunnel SSL based protocols like HTTPS and SNEWS.

SNEWS over SSL Tunneling is in bug 56291.

SOCKS support comes in two flavors V4 and V5. Support for the V5 "connection"
protocol has been checked in, and changes in mailnews are needed to make SOCKS
connections, see bug 44995.

SOCKS V4 is currently unimplemented, bug 50679 is essentially the "SOCKS
V5-only" bug.

--
I have also tried to aggregate brief but accurate descriptions of the underlying
technical issues:

http://www.packetgram.com/pktg/proxy/

Comment 14

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 116930 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[R.K.Aa.]

*** Bug 233365 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 17

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Very little activity in 15 years, almost no fixes, only one open bug, and little upkeep. So closing