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User profile for user: rocksolido
rocksolido Author
User level: Level 1
7 points

I need mail.app to autoconfig our mail server settings

Hi all,


We run a long established business email service and would like to have the mail.app client autoconfigure.


When we do the following, we run up against this problem.

1. Create a new account

2. Select Add Other Account

3. Select Add a Mail Account

4. Enter the Full Name, Email address and Password


mail.app then displays

Discovering settings: account must be manually configured.


If we run Wireshark, the mail.app client is connecting to mac-services.ls-apple.com.akadns.net and is looking for our mail server settings.


146 30.056365000 8.8.8.8 192.168.8.253 DNS 196 Standard query response 0x2789 CNAME mac-services.ls-apple.com.akadns.net A 17.134.62.229 A 17.134.62.228 A 17.134.126.229 A 17.134.126.228


This is great news, however we have not provided our settings to Apple and we've not managed to find out how this is possible.

We checked https://ssl.apple.com/support/mail-settings-lookup/ and our server is not listed.


Can anyone in the community help?

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)

Posted on Jul 17, 2014 2:44 AM

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3 replies
User profile for user: John Lockwood
John Lockwood
User level: Level 6
13,685 points

Jul 17, 2014 4:08 AM in response to rocksolido

Apple Mail does support Microsoft Exchange auto-discovery for setting up an Exchange account in Mail (and also Contacts and Calendar). So if you are providing an Exchange service or at least something compatible enough with Exchange which in this case means you would have to support Exchange Web Services (not MAPI) then that would be a method to follow. I have done this with Kerio Connect as an example.


http://kb.kerio.com/product/kerio-connect/server-configuration/ssl-certificates/ how-to-configure-an-environment-to-enable-autodiscover-feature-with-kerio-connec t-870.html


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb124251(v=exchg.150).aspx


Other than that, the usual method for auto-configuring clients is to use a Mobile Device Management solution and send a mobileconfig file to the Mac client with the settings for their email account.

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User profile for user: rocksolido
rocksolido Author
User level: Level 1
7 points

Jul 18, 2014 1:21 AM in response to John Lockwood

Thank you for the reply.


We had looked into the auto discover features for Exchange, however in our case our servers are using Cyrus and Postfix so we have been exploring the other auto configuration options (eg. cname, autodiscover.xml/php, etc.) as well as proprietary email clients that do an online database lookup.

One of those steps is that the Apple client immediately connects to an Apple service to check for known mail server settings (as shown above).


We see that if we use https://ssl.apple.com/support/mail-settings-lookup/ and check some other email providers using Cyrus/Postfix etc. the correct mail server settings for the email provider is displayed from the Apple database.


What we would like to know is where we can add in our mail server setting so the Apple client will respond correctly with our details.


It's not clear to us whether there is an established process for doing this, does anyone have any further experience of this?

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I need mail.app to autoconfig our mail server settings

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