Bugzilla

Bug 1571772 apparently changed how the autoconfig works wrt. offering Exchange and thus promoting the Owl add-on. 

Now, even if IMAP and SMTP setups are found, the autoconfig will list Exchange as an option *and* select that by default. This is clearly not how this was supposed to be handled, and not how the flow was agreed to be handled when we discussed Owl integration points last year. We're not interested in listing a proprietary protocol that requires a commercial add-on to be installed, and certainly not interested in having it be the default. Exchange support should only be listed as a last resort, if no other means of connecting are available.

Besides obvious problems from setting unsuspecting users to use a proprietary protocol with unknown future support, it is also confusing to users that didn't realize they had no reason to buy an add-on to get their mails, and then Thunderbird still asked for a donation as the application download page. (A complaint in this regard is what lead me to discover this bug.) => Bad rep for Thunderbird.

STR: try to set up an @outlook.com address. You'll get set up to use Exchange as default.

The fact that this change was implemented + reviewed by the two people working the Owl add-on certainly doesn't make this any prettier! :(