Outlook mail client configuration is broken

Submitted by Hal9000 on Sat, 02/08/2014 - 13:43

While the Thunderbird autoconfiguration works fine, the Outlook configuration does not. The reason being that Virtualmin does not add a DNS record for autodiscover nor does it add a ServerAlias for it in the apache configuration file.

Also, as far as I can tell Outlook requires an https connection, so this would work for SSL websites only. Btw autodiscover can also be tested here https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/ which gives some feedback on problems.

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Sat, 02/08/2014 - 18:25

Thanks for pointing this out - I will have Virtualmin use the correct capitalization for the URL in future. However, the autodiscover domain prefix isn't mandatory.

Based on the connectivity check, it seems that Outlook requires SSL and a valid cert for accessing the autodiscover URL. This kind of limits the usefulness of this feature in a typical shared hosting environment.

Submitted by Hal9000 on Sun, 02/09/2014 - 02:49

Oh, I deleted the capitalization comment but I guess you still got it by email. I ran fiddler and my Outlook 2013 apparently tried the lowercase variant. So probably the connectivity check kind of fooled me.

However, I noticed Outlook 2013 only tried the autodiscover subdomain, but you are correct the specification does not strictly require the subdomain. So no idea what to think about this.

About the SSL thing I guess Virtualmin could just set up the feature on ssl websites. But that's not so important.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Sun, 02/09/2014 - 12:41

For simplicity's sake this is setup at the same time as Thunderbird autodiscovery, which doesn't require SSL.

Does outlook use the lower-case only URL, or mixed case?

Submitted by Hal9000 on Mon, 02/10/2014 - 10:49

As far as I can tell, actually lowercase.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Mon, 02/10/2014 - 12:38

Microsoft must be trolling me then, because their online test site for autoconfig URLs use /AutoDiscover/AutoDiscover.xml !

I guess I will need to support both in Virtualmin.

Submitted by Issues on Mon, 02/24/2014 - 12:41

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.