when creating a new mail account in K9 mail, it only asks for the E-Mail address and finds the corresponding IMAP, POP3, and SMTP servers on its own.
Is it documented somewhere how K9 resolves those servers? Is it done via the official autodiscover/autoconfig mechanisms or is it simply attaching imap, pop, or smtp to the mail domain or is there some kind of K9 lookup table?
I am asking, because the mechanism does not resolve the correct servers on my private setup and I would like to understand what I have to reconfigure.
Thanks for the information.
Will K-9 Mail support the whole Thunderbird autoconfig or only the ISPDB (because the README.me file in your link mainly focuses on ISPDB)?
How exactly does K-9 Mail behave in the older versions (<= 6.708) if the domain is not found in the providers.xml? Will it simply attach imap, pop, or smtp to the domain?
Yes, the app will suggest a server name based on the email domain and protocol the user has selected. The subdomains are imap, pop3, and smtp. But you’ll always end up in the manual setup flow. The best you can do is to use those exact server names (and ports). That way manual setup can be reduced to tapping the “Next” button.
That’s because there’s currently no good documentation for autoconfig
The beta supports fetching the config from https://autoconfig.{domain}/mail/config-v1.1.xml or https://{domain}/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.xml. It does not support the server name guessing step that is included in Thunderbird.
However it seems like K9 does not like a redirect response (status 302 in my case) when requesting the .well-known URL. My webspace does issue this redirect when this URL is requested, and the result is in fact a valid XML provided by them instead of me (overriding my own version). Thunderbird works with this setup, i.e. they seem to follow the redirect.
I tried adding the autoconfig.domain variant, and that works with K9, apparently because that isn’t redirected.
This isn’t redirected, and then K9 had a green icon and was displaying the config. If you want to reproduce locally, you have to block the second autoconfig location. The second location is serving exactly the same file.
Edit:
Just confirmed it again: Renaming the file will lead to 404 at the autoconfig domain, and the redirect still works. K9 states it cannot load the config.
Restoring the correct name, and it immediately works.
Thunderbird requires a <domain> element with a valid hostname value. We also implemented that check in K-9 Mail (even though neither Thunderbird nor K-9 Mail use this value for anything). The problem is that Thunderbird’s check allows placeholder values like %EMAILDOMAIN%, while K-9 Mail currently doesn’t.
