566563 - Usage of the HTTP 1.1 Connect IMAP/POP3/SMTP access method via proxy

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 264981

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[kengaru]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1064 Safari/532.5
Build Identifier: 3.0.4

There is a common method of establishing the TCP connections via proxy servers to virtually any TCP service outside of proxy - HTTP/1.1 Connect method. It's described in RFC 2616 "HTTP/1.1" and, in paragraphs 5.2-5.3 of RFC 2817 "Upgrading to TLS Within HTTP/1.1". 

It could be the good idea to support it in the Thunderbird for accessing POP3, IMAP, SMTP servers outside the proxy, especially for the corporate environment. 

It's simplifies the proxy server setup (no need to setup Socks proxy server) and could allow a lot of people to get access to their mail in the environment, there whey aren't allowed to change anything (f.e. setup additional proxy services).

It's discussed in here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1289785 , and, even Windows code example quoted.


Reproducible: Always