DNS SRV for autoconfiguration
Ognyan Kulev
Recently I found draft RFC "Use of SRV records for locating email
services" <http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-daboo-srv-email-02.txt> and I
was surprised to find that it's not considered for Thunderbird
autoconfiguration, for example it's not mentioned in
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:DNSBasedLookup
, although technically both TXT and SRV DNS RR resolving are not
supported (AFAIK) in Thunderbird ATM. DNS SRV is briefly mentioned in
comments of <http://ascher.ca/blog/2009/01/20/how-should-we-manage-
autoconfiguration-files/>. I agree that the TXT solution is about
finding Mozilla XML config file format which extends a little what can
be described by SRVs. So is there consideration about using SRVs,
which (hopefully) will be become RFC?
Example RRs from the draft that I've posted in <https://
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2679#c20>:
_submission._tcp SRV 0 1 587 mail.example.com.
_imap._tcp SRV 0 1 143 imap.example.com.
_imaps._tcp SRV 0 1 993 imap.example.com.
_pop3._tcp SRV 0 1 110 pop3.example.com.
_pop3s._tcp SRV 0 1 995 pop3.example.com.
In the guidelines of the draft, there's suggested use of this
information.
Regards,
Ognyan Kulev
Eddy Nigg
On 08/26/2009 12:51 PM, Ognyan Kulev:
> Recently I found draft RFC "Use of SRV records for locating email
> services"<http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-daboo-srv-email-02.txt> and I
> was surprised to find that it's not considered for Thunderbird
> autoconfiguration, for example it's not mentioned in
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:DNSBasedLookup
> , although technically both TXT and SRV DNS RR resolving are not
> supported (AFAIK) in Thunderbird ATM. DNS SRV is briefly mentioned in
> comments of<http://ascher.ca/blog/2009/01/20/how-should-we-manage-
> autoconfiguration-files/>. I agree that the TXT solution is about
> finding Mozilla XML config file format which extends a little what can
> be described by SRVs.
>
I'm the author of
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:DNSBasedLookup
and at the time of that writing the IETF draft for email SRVs didn't
exist. We considered SRV records, but suggested to use TXT records
instead. However different SRV records could achieve about the same
flexibility as with XML config files, the final config could be better
protected by SSL. Even though both options seem to be far superior to
what TB does today, they were rejected. Maybe Apple will get such a
standard of the ground...
--
Regards
Signer: Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd.
Jabber: star...@startcom.org
Blog: https://blog.startcom.org
Peter Saint-Andre
Hash: SHA1
On 8/26/09 3:51 AM, Ognyan Kulev wrote:
> Recently I found draft RFC "Use of SRV records for locating email
> services" <http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-daboo-srv-email-02.txt> and I
> was surprised to find that it's not considered for Thunderbird
> autoconfiguration
That is a very early Internet-Draft, undergoing much discussion on the
apps-d...@ietf.org list (feel free to subscribe), and very much
subject to change. That said, SRV records are in general preferable for
locating services (e.g., we use them to discover XMPP services), so
perhaps someday that approach will become common for mail servers. But
don't hold your breath. :)
Peter
- --
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/
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Dan Mosedale
> So is there consideration about using SRVs, which (hopefully) will be become RFC?
>
than hostnames and pointer records. Fixing Gecko to offer the necessary
infrastructure for this would be a significant amount of work. That
said, if some enterprising programmer wanted to work with the Gecko
folks to do that design and coding, the dev-tech-netlib mailing list
would be the place to start that discussion.
Dan