906211 - [email/activesync] Improve our support for ActiveSync autodiscovery

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::E-Mail, enhancement)

Description

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Our ActiveSync autodiscover code needs some improvements to get it up to spec, due in no small part to how difficult it is to find anything on MSDN. Thankfully, I've finally found a very detailed spec for how autodiscover should work: <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exchange/hh352638%28v=exchg.140%29.aspx>.

The benefit of following this is that autodiscover will work for a much wider variety of Exchange servers, making users' lives easier and getting us closer to ActiveSync logo support.

There are a few specific things we need to add:

1) Query http://autodiscover.<domain>/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml (note that this is HTTP, not HTTPS), but only to see if we get an HTTP redirect somewhere. Maybe this is dangerous though, and we shouldn't do it!

2) Check for an HTTP 401 error and if we see it, throw up a new form asking for the user's Windows domain and username.

3) Change the order that we run autodiscover checks, so that https://autodiscover.<domain>/... is first, and maybe parallelize the checks for more speed.

4) (One day) Support DNS SRV lookups. This requires platform support, so I don't think we should address this feature here, but it's worth noting for completeness.

Comment 1

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Here's another big one that we need to fix:

5) We need the ability to handle HTTP 302 redirects manually. Since Gecko turns a POST that gets 302'ed into a GET, autodiscover falls down. If we could intercept the redirect in our XHR (or even be aware that a redirect happened so we can retry with a POST), that would fix autodiscovery for a bunch of servers. Most notably, it would fix it for all Hotmail domains that aren't "hotmail.com" (although we hardcode the configuration for these domains anyway).

Comment 2

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

Jim Porter deleted the linked story in Pivotal Tracker

Comment 3

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

(In reply to Hema Koka [:hema] from comment #2)
> Jim Porter deleted the linked story in Pivotal Tracker

Sorry, I grabbed one too many bugs from my list, and this obviously isn't a media bug!

Comment 4

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Updated URL (I think): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh352638%28v=exchg.140%29.aspx

Comment 5

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

I think I might have found a big part of the problem we're having.  It looks like our autodiscover parser thinks the root node of the response should be in the "ad" namespace ('responseschema/2006'), but the examples all show all of the response being in the same "ms" namespace ('mobilesync/responseschema/2006').

Or rather, I should clarify:
- the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee202234%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx example sets the root namespace and makes sense
- the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh352638%28v=exchg.140%29.aspx#sectionSection2 response example seems broken because it uses a prefixed namespace that does not apply to the root element

I'm fixing this in the tried and true fashion of using a boolean or to try both, but I'm also plumbing errors through to our logging a bit more so it should be more obvious when this type of thing is happening.

Comment 6

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on