The bootstrap question is addressed by requiring the end-user to know their e-mail address and password. Based on the domain name, the implementation would reach out to https://something.domain-name.tld and download the relevant "schema" and data for IMAP, SMTP, POP3, etc, in ordered priority. Based on what the e-mail client could support, the desired settings would be displayed, and upon end-user approval, applied. This could be leveraged by RIM for their BIS, Microsoft/Gmail/etc for smartphones, and for third-party webmail hosts such as mail2web.com Frank -----Original Message----- From: John Levine [mailto:johnl@iecc.com] Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 9:24 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Cc: frnkblk@iname.com Subject: Re: Is your ISP blocking outgoing port 25?
It's a pity that MAAWG or another group hasn't written a specification for the automatic downloading of configuration (with certificates, to be sure, for some kind of repudiation) and the update thereof, for adoption by the leading consumer e-mail clients.
MAAWG decided it's not in the standards business, but it does BCPs pointing at standards elsewhere (mostly the IETF) that it encourages people to follow. Write a standard that people can use, and I don't think I'd have much trouble getting them to endorse it. It's an interesting design topic, particularly the bootstrap question of how the client decides where to look for its configuration. A lot of this stuff is already available via DHCP, but of course a key goal here is to set config info the last across reboots on different networks. Followup to IETF-something, I suspect. R's, John