To improve the slightly complicated setup, an autodiscovery mechanism for mailbox setups would be awesome. While this is only one aspect of the mailhandler stack's configuration, it would be a good starting point for an "It just works" user experience.

Autodiscovery implementations exist in Outlook, Thunderbird and other OS and Non-OS MUAs.
PHP IMAP doesn't implement it, and I didn't find a good license-compatible PHP implementation, so we probably need to write an own one, which should not be a big deal.
Reading configuration XMLs is very straightforward, and if that doesn't exist, we can fallback to testing most common configurations.

The MS variant is documented here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc511507%28v=office.14%29.aspx

The Mozilla variant is documented here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration/F...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:ConfigFileFormat
Mozilla Messaging also hosts ISPDB, which is free to use for any clients.

While the SMTP configuration currently isn't used by mailhandler itself, we could store and provide it to potentially interested modules such as .

Comments

Dane Powell’s picture

Dane Powell CreditAttribution: Dane Powell commented

Great idea. Does it really need to be bound to the retrieval library (PHP IMAP), or can it just be a layer on top of it?

I will say that I've never had much luck with autoconfiguration, I'd hate for it to just make things more complicated. But maybe I'm an outlier.