Re: [art] Auto-configuring Email Clients via WebFinger

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

In article <[e-mail]> you write:
> |>> Plan A: if the server needs the user name and password, it sends back
> |>> a 401 response and the MUA sends them via RFC 7617 basic
> |>> authentication.  That seems largely backward compatible and invents a
> |>> minimum of new stuff.
>
>Just yesterday i (currently implementing OAUTHBEARER for a BSD
>Mail clone) thought how easy it would be if the OAUTHBEARER
>request would have additional fields, like refresh-token etc.

I believe you, but as I may have said once or twice before, my
proposal is intended to be a compatible extension of the autoconfig
that the most popular open source MUA already has.

> |One of the reasons Mozilla checks https://autoconfig.<domain>/ is exactly \
> |this:
> |it lets the mail department run a small special purpose web server \
> |separate from the main web servers.
>
>I will never understand where the benefit of turning mail clients
>into fully blown browsers actually is.

I don't see how this follows.  In both of these proposals, the MUA makes
a few HTTP requests and then gets a blob of XML or JSON.  That skips the 95%
of browsers that render HTML.  (We'll ignore the detail that modern MUAs all
have that 95% anyway to render HTML mail.)

>Are you trying to enforce code reuse of anyway linked-in web kits,
>otherwise i do not know.

No, I'm trying to make it backward compatible with existing MUAs.

>In the end i will have to implement actions aka "clickable" URLs
>for a text-mode mail reader.

I don't understand that at all.  Why would you need to do that?

R's,
John