March 2011
To ease Thunderbird configuration for employees, a company may create http://autoconfig.emailaddressdomain/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=user@emailaddressdomain. We have mailaddresses “username@domain” but the servers expect usernames “somenumber”, and according to the docs, the translation of those isn't implemented yet.
So we resort to PHP in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName autoconfig.example.com ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost <IfModule mod_php5.c> AddType application/x-httpd-php .xml </IfModule> DocumentRoot /srv/autoconfig/ <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None </Directory> Alias "/mail/" "/srv/autoconfig/mail/" <Directory "/srv/autoconfig/mail/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None </Directory> </VirtualHost>
...and create config-v1.1.xml
(not shown).
After this, if we fake the DNS through editing /etc/hosts
, we only have to fill in name, mail address, and password when configuring Thunderbird.
Now let's wait for the DNS to get updated...
Interesting further reading: on javascript autoconfiguration of Thunderbird.