454568 - Configure Mail and LDAP Adressbook automatically

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[KOM]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; de; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Version 2.0.0.16 (20080708)

A real cool feature could be if thunderbird would configure automaticly like outlook 2007+exchange. 

When you start thunderbird the first time, all needed informations could be catched by the domaincontroller and the dns server.

- username, domain, logonserver are systemvariables
- ou, base and bind-dn, mail adress and a lot of other information can be requested from the domaincontroller (logonserver)
- reduntant ldapservers can be found by a nslookp (SRV records)
- internal mailservers can be found by a nslookup (MX record)
- certificates can be catched from the windows domaincontroller

another easy way could be a grouppolicy like the office configuration...

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. you must allways configure everything
Actual Results:  
-

Expected Results:  
configuration dialog like outlook 2007 with an exchange server.

ask if settings are ok and continue

-

Comment 1

[mozilla.denture347]

I second this request. While I don't know Outlook all that well, I can imagine this working great.

In my environment I'm working with FreeIPA so I'll focus on the Linux configuration.

As KOM mentioned, a lot of information is already present on the system. Since Thunderbird already supports the autoconfig xml file, and this is a kerberized environment, all my users need to do is entering the account name and email address and press enter. This could be further facilitated by thunderbird running through the following process during the first start:

For illustrative purposes I'll add shell commands

1. Get searchdomain from system localdomain=$(hostname -d)
2. Confirm existence of mail server for this domain by running a DNS query for MX records on the domain nslookup -type=MX $localdomain
3. Prepopulate the full name field getent passwd "$USER" | cut -d ':' -f 5 | cut -d ',' -f 1
4. Prepopulate the mail address field $USER@$localdomain
5. If the user accepts this, continue with the usual autoconfig.
6. From here on out I am not entirely sure which way I would prefer but currently thunderbird is prefering the autoconfig over the rfc6186 SRV record so we should probably stay with that scheme.

• Specify the connection data for the LDAP server in the autoconfig
• Look for SRV records for ldap _ldap._tcp.$localdomain/_ldaps._tcp.$localdomain # In case there were no changes made. Otherwise use mail domain

As you can see there is not a whole lot of functionality missing for this kind of autoconfig.

Another thing to debate would be if this should only happen on first launch or if it should be done on every new account creation with an additional check being done if there is already an account known for this domain in which case the logic would not run.

Comment 2

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

The current account setup already does this, showing a full list of all address books and calendars connected to the recently configured email account.
Adding those is opt-in, but we're exploring an autoconfiguration/opt-out approach in the new account hub.

Comment 3

[mozilla.denture347]

Thanks for your reply.

I generally like the opt-in approach but I don't mind exploring the opt-out as well, especially since most users won't read the "success" page and therefore miss the related account integration. It would be great to have a setting for this in the policies.json. I'd imagine the section to look something along the lines of:

"autoconfig": {
  "enable": true | false,
  "allowed_types": ["Mail", "CalDAV", "CardDAV", "LDAP"],
  "allowed_domains": []
  "forbidden_domains": []
}

with allowed and forbidden being mutually exclusive.

After crawling the thunderbird documentation over the past few days, I understand that the mail configuration itself is taking the autoconfig xml file while CalDAV and CardDAV use their respective SRV records, however there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for automatic LDAP configuration. Thus my above suggestion.

Comment 4

[chrizilla]

added based on comment #0