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

["Bron Gondwana" <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019, at 05:31, Paul E. Jones wrote:
> ART folks,
> 
> Several years ago when I was working on WebFinger, one of the use cases I presented was using WebFinger to facilitate auto-configuring email clients. It was and still is a problem I deal with today.
> 
> For my own family, I have to manually configure several different clients on several different platforms for each member of the family. It's time consuming and really needs to be made simpler.
> 
> My wife also has to deal with this issue where she works, because her company, while just 100 or so employees, has offices in two different countries and the mail server settings an employee uses depends on his or her geographic location. To use standard IETF protocols, it means a lot of manual provisioning.
> 
> I see the same sort of challenges with service providers. If one wants to have his or her own domain, but isn't technically savvy, they're in for a lot of "fun" trying to figure out the various settings. Seriously, no normal person should have to understand what SMTP or IMAP means, and definitely what port numbers or security settings to fill in.
> 
> While there has been a generic DNS-based method for email provision for a while, it doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for my wife's company, either. It also doesn't define everything one might need to define (e.g., required security settings or policies).
> 
> So we put together a very simple example to show how this might be done with WebFinger. See the draft here:
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jones-webfinger-email-autoconfig-00

There's also been discussion about doing the same thing for caldav and carddav in CalConnect, which was led by Marten. It would be good to combine this work!

Cheers,

Bron.

-- 
 Bron Gondwana
 [e-mail]