For additional guidance, check out our community articles detailing the process of migrating from your current platform to Carbonio CE.
Zimbra Autodiscover is a very useful function that can be used on any mail client that support it, both mobile and local. It works using EAS (Exchange ActiveSync) Protocol and allows any client to configure automatically the appropriate Server settings for Communication avoiding the needing to enter them manually. All you need to enter is your email address and password.
To get an overview on how to use Autodiscover function with EAS protocol on a mobile device, you can refer to this documentation.
How it works
Autodiscover uses one of these four methods to configure the email client. If the check on one fails, it will go on with the others.
- Connect to: https://sampledomain.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml
- Connect to: https://autodiscover.sampledomain.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml
- Connect to: http://autodiscover.sampledomain.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml (Same as the previous one, but without SSL)
- Search for DNS SRV record to get the autodiscover.tcp.sampledomain.com that will reply to “mail.sampledomain.com“
How to set up and configure Autodiscover
What is important for Autodiscover to work properly, are DNS entries. Let’s see how to create the right entries and how to test them:
Creating DNS entries
First of all we are going to set a CNAME DNS entry targeting the right Zimbra FQDN. For example we can have autodiscover.sample.com pointing to example.sample.com. Using CLI, you should add the following line to your Domain Zone file:
autodiscover IN CNAME example.sample.comYou can also use the admin interface, and enter the desired values:
After doing that we have to enter the SRV DNS record, with the Zimbra FQDN, the service, the protocol, the priority, the weight, the port, and the hostname. Again, using CLI you have to add the following line to your Domain Zone file:
_autodiscover._tcp IN SRV 0 0 443 example.sample.comwhile, if you are going via Admin interface, you simply have to fill as follows:
When you’re done, you can proceed to verify your entries. Let’s see how.
Check the Autodiscover using the DNS
You can check your settings to see if you properly configured DNS before start using Zimbra Autodiscover on your mail client.
Using CLI on your Linux OS you can use the following command:
dig _autodiscover._tcp.sample.com SRV
