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Re:Show HN: Unibox, the people-centric email client released... by Touche on Thursday October 24, 2013 @10:35AM (#6605467)
Wow, the autodetect is pretty amazing. I'm using Fastmail with my own domain but it correctly knew which servers to use. I always thought that email clients just look at the domain and if it's gmail.com, yahoo.com, it uses those settings, but it sounds like this is checking MX records? Any insight into how it's able to do this (never seen another client be able to)?
Re:Show HN: Unibox, the people-centric email client released... by mrud on Thursday October 24, 2013 @10:57AM (#6605617)
Mozilla describes a canonical way to detect settings [1]:

1) Use the global ISPDB, e.g. https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/$DOMAIN, e.g https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/gmail.com and extract the information

2) Try to use the provider specific db http://autoconfig.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddr...

3) Fallback to http://example.com/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.x...

It also utilizes MX records and not only the domain.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird...

Re:Show HN: Unibox, the people-centric email client released... by lassejansen on Thursday October 24, 2013 @10:41AM (#6605508)
Yes, we're checking MX records.
Re:Show HN: Unibox, the people-centric email client released... by grinich on Sunday October 27, 2013 @08:49PM (#6624427)
Checking MX records is super easy.

    dig gmail.com MX