Autodiscover settings

Microsoft no longer supports autodiscover for SMTP / IMAP in recent versions of Outlook, so this guide is no longer supported.

What is Autodiscover and what is it used for?

Autodiscover is a protocol that allows email clients (e.g. Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook) to configure server connection parameters for your email address automatically, instead of configuring all parameters manually. This will save yourself some time, especially if you have to configure a lot of accounts.

To use the autodiscover system, make sure that your client supports this feature, as not all email clients currently support it. Furthermore, it is necessary to change the DNS configuration of your domain to add some parameters that will allow you to contact the autodiscover service in an appropriate way.

Configuring Autodiscover for your domain certainly makes it easier for users the first set up their email account, and voids any found typos. It is also a very simple configuration to perform and has no additional cost or impact on performance.

The implementation of Ruachost Business Email Autordiscover provides IMAP and SMTP parameters for desktop email clients and Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync for Smartphones.

The Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync service is available for domains with Enterprise plan only.

The advantage of using EAS is its easy configuration on mobile devices and the real-time Push notifications for new emails and events in the calendar.

Compatibility

Not all email clients are currently compatible. A list of clients that can host Autodiscover is available below:

Client	Version	Protocol
Microsoft Outlook	2013 and newer	IMAP and SMTP
Microsoft App Mail Contacts and Calendar	Windows 10	Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync
Mozilla Thunderbird	60 and newer	IMAP e SMTP
Android	latest	Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync
Apple iOS	12 and newer	Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync

Setup Autodiscover through VirtualHost

To guarantee a full compatibility with the majority of email clients, we suggest to create your own VirtualHost associated to your domain, in the form autodiscover.mycompany.com with a valid SSL certificate installed. In VirtualHost, you will have to add a 302 redirect to Ruachost Business Email’s Autodiscover server.

Substitute mycompany.com with the name of your domain.

You can find a VirtualHost example with the redirect rules in the example below:

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName autodiscover.mycompany.com
  ServerAlias autoconfig.mycompany.com

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^.*config-v1\.1\.xml$ https://autodiscover.emailpnl.com/thunderbird.php [NC,R=302,L]
  RewriteRule ^.*autodiscover\.xml$ https://autodiscover.emailpnl.com/outlook.php [NC,R=302,L]
  RewriteRule ^.*autodiscover\.json$ https://autodiscover.emailpnl.com/outlook.json.php [NC,R=302,L]

  SSLEngine on
  SSLCertificateFile /path/to/ssl.cert
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/ssl.key
</VirtualHost>

Alternatively, if you cannot change the virtualhost directly, you can create a .htaccess file to insert in the document root of your autodiscover.mycompany.com domain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*config-v1\.1\.xml$ https://autodiscover.emailpnl.com/thunderbird.php [NC,R=302,L]
RewriteRule ^.*autodiscover\.xml$ https://autodiscover.emailpnl.com/outlook.php [NC,R=302,L]
RewriteRule ^.*autodiscover\.json$ https://autodiscover.emailpnl.com/outlook.json.php [NC,R=302,L]

Both configurations showed above require a mod_rewrite module enabled in Apache.

Setup Autodiscover through DNS Record

If you do not have the possibility to create a Virtual Host in HTTPS, you can still configure the Autodiscover through a configuration on the DNS domain. It is important to remember that this configuration may not be enough to make the autodiscover compatible on your email client. Access the DNS management panel of your domain’s provider and add the following CNAME record as follows:

Record	Record type	Value
autoconfig.mycompany.com	CNAME	autodiscover.emailpnl.com.
autodiscover.mycompany.com	CNAME	autodiscover.emailpnl.com.

The above setting authorizes your email client to contact the Ruachost Business Email autodiscover service to obtain the mail server configuration data for your domain.

The autoconfig record is used by Thunderbird, while autodiscover is used by EAS / Outlook.

Once the above listed records have been added, it can take up to 24 hours for the DNS change to become fully operational.

Setup autodiscover in Private Label

• pop.DOMAIN
• imap.DOMAIN
• smtp.DOMAIN

Verify the correct setup of the autodiscover records

In order to verify the correct settings for the autodiscover records on your domain, you can run the following nslookup commands from a terminal:

nslookup -q=cname autoconfig.mycompany.com nslookup -q=cname autodiscover.mycompany.com

which should respond respectively with the following result:

**autoconfig.mycompany.com canonical name = autodiscover.emailpnl.com.**autoconfig.mycompany.com canonical name = autodiscover.emailpnl.com.