910064 - Modify aol.com listing to support initial-SSL connection

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webtools :: ISPDB Database Entries, defect)

Description

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

In a previous discussion on tb-planning about aol.com we raised the idea of changing the AOL entry to use SSL initially:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2013-January/002546.html

There was some concern that AOL did not seem to document support for using port 465, and then we/I generally dropped the ball when the aol.com issue stopped being a blocker.

In a recent investigation I have found that there is documented support for port 465, see:
http://help.aol.com/help/microsites/microsite.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=72727

The specific quote is:
===
IMAP Setup Information

    IMAP Username: [e-mail]
    Incoming Mail Server: imap.aol.com (Use port 143 for standard or 993 for SSL connections)
    SMTP Outgoing Server Address: smtp.aol.com Set the port to 587 (If using SSL, set port to 465)
    SMTP Username: [e-mail]
    SMTP Password: password you use to login to Mail 
===

What's particularly worth noting is that the AOL support docs in general give horrible advice.  For example, the Thunderbird and Thunderbird for Mac screenshots on http://help.aol.com/help/microsites/microsite.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=72588 tell the user to explicit set secure connection to "No" rather than TLS-unless-I'm-being-attacked, TLS-always, or SSL.

I have also verified port 465 works.


Anywho, I suggest we make the change since initial SSL connect is faster than a startTLS upgrade and this has the nice side-effect of making existing Firefox OS devices in the field support aol.com automatically.  On the referenced bug 907525 I am going to land a local-autoconfig entry for Firefox OS as a stop-gap.  Also note that it looks we might get startTLS support on Firefox OS for v1.2 but I think the SSL-faster-than-startTLS thing still seems like a good change to make for AOL.

I will provide a patch.

Comment 1

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

Copy-and-paste-fail, bug 907525 got duped to 827549.

Comment 2

[echo4]

Attachment: aol.com.xml

Attached autoconfig file to update settings for 
 * https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/aol.com
 * https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/aim.com
 * https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/netscape.net

Documentation (lang="en")
  How do I set up other email applications to send and receive my AOL Mail?
  https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-use-other-email-applications-to-send-and-receive-my-aol-mail

Comment 3

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

Thanks for the updated entry!

Regarding comment 0, note that Jim was originally proposing that we use port 465 for reasons of necessity.  We did find 465 works and I think it still works, but since the documentation is not calling it out, it does seem safest/simplest/most pragmatic to just run with port 587 now, which is what the provided config file does.  Clients that care could potentially just guess and try 465 themselves as part of the probing.

Other changes in this file include removing the STARTTLS entries for IMAP and POP3, which is consistent with both the comment 0 proposal and the linked documentation.

Also note that while tracing the history of the file I realized "xmllint --format" had been used to clean up the files, so I've done that to normalize this file and will do that going forward.

$ svn commit
Sending        aol.com
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 150306.