Autodiscover & Autoconfig for Outlook, Thunderbird & Mobile Devices

What is Autodiscover & Autoconfig ?

They are web services that are used by a growing number of applications and which help in configuring your mobile devices and desktop clients. Autodiscover is used by all mobile devices including iPhone, iPod, iPad and Android devices while Autoconfig is used by Thunderbird. These services allow you to configure an e-mail account by only entering your e-mail address and password, without having to worry about incoming servers, outgoing servers or ports. All communication is configured to be secured through SSL by default.

DNS Configuration

The configuration is very simple and straightforward. It only implies the addition of two A type records in the DNS of the domain for which you wish to enable these services. They are:

A record hostname	Points to
autodiscover.<yourdomain.com>	69.28.212.195
autoconfig.<yourdomain.com>	69.28.212.195

Desktop Clients

Modern e-mail clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird support automatic configuration through specific web services. These services make configuration of the e-mail client a lot faster by automatically filling in the required server names and ports. With PolarisMail, these services will automatically configure an SSL IMAP account along with SSL SMTP access. In order to benefit from these services, you have to setup the following entries in the DNS for your domain:

Configuring the e-mail clients after this DNS change becomes a lot easier.

Outlook:

Go to Tools -> Account Settings and click on New