779323 - Email app should resolve DNS MX records on-device

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

The e-mail application's autoconfiguration mechanism is, like Thunderbird (whose implementation B2g email is attempting to reuse), going to use DNS MX lookups to help locate the appropriate mail server for a user's e-mail address.

Currently, this will be done by reusing Thunderbird's server infrastructure.  It would be greatly preferred if this could be done on the device rather than querying the mozilla server infrastructure which is undesirable because 1) it requires a server infrastructure and 2) it exposes to mozilla the user's email domain.

An example URL for an MX lookup for gmail com:
https://mx-live.mozillamessaging.com/dns/mx/gmail.com

There are really 2 required steps here:

1) Have platform make it possible for chrome-privileged code to retrieve this information.  This is mainly bug 735967.  (Bug 545866 is related but more like a previous effort than the logical successor to 735967.)

2) Expose the API to the e-mail client via some Web API.  The API would probably want to be privileged like the TCP API for security reasons, especially if it ended up exposing mDNS data as well.

Comment 1

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Note that there are no plans to attempt to do this for v1 of the e-mail app.  This is a longer term aspirational goal.  The comparable bug for Thunderbird is bug 563958.

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on