How Mozilla Thunderbird uses RDF database of IMAP hosts and ports

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to guess of the IMAP host and port from the email. This is being done in Thunderbird and a similar question was posted here: Getting mail server details from an email address?

I've looked at the thunderbird source and find RDF files with the IMAP and host and port data for Gmail and AOL. See: http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/base/ispdata/

My question is how is Mozilla actually using this data. It is keeping an RDF database of user supplied IMAP host and port for each domain? Or are these 2 the only domains they have data for?

I can't seem to find the code that interacts with this data. The closest I've come is with the function getIspDefaultsForUri(domainURI): http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/base/prefs/content/ispUtils.js#105 I'm not familiar with the mozilla thunderbird codebase so searching it is a bit painstaking right now.

On the other hand, if someone knows of a different database or web service that contains mapping of email domains to the IMAP settings that would be a great help.

Answer 1

I don't believe that they use the Thunderbird's configuration data obtained from their end users and put that into their database -- that would be a pretty intrusive thing from the privacy point of view. The TB's documentation on autoconfiguration describes how they obtain the configuration data.

For the other part of your question, have a look at RFC 6186 which uses the DNS SRV records for specifying the IMAP server to use (and with TB, it's bug 342242.