GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 590523
Simplify account creation by settings db
Last modified: 2012-06-28 15:52:14 UTC
The account creation process can be simplified using a small database for the most essential webmail providers and their settings. The first page of the assistant should ask for mail address and password. Using the mail address Evolution can make a db lookup and read the settings for this provider (smtp, imap/pop3 server, encryption settings). The user would just have to affirm the settings. A small database (ini file?) with the top 10 freemail provider for every country should fix most of the cases. Example: Mail adress is foo@bar.com. Check in the ini file for the setings of bar.com, read them and fill the rest of the assistant's fields with the defaults.
(In reply to comment #0) > A small database (ini file?) with the top 10 freemail provider for every > country should fix most of the cases. Know of any such database?
No I fear this data must be collected online. I just checked my personal account database (Germany and international). 7 users.sourceforge.net 8 yahoo.de 9 gmail.com 16 gmx.net 17 t-online.de 58 web.de 69 gmx.de Below that it is far more specific (companies, universities...). I got 355 addresses in my local db. Adding only these would fix it for about 50% of my friends/germany (?). Adding the top 10 for each country of the rest of the world would fix some more: 6 hotmail.com 2 yahoo.com 3 gmx.ch 3 googlemail.com Whats left are company/university providers and some addresses of friends who set up their own mailserver...these should known their settings :-)
Modest has a package for this called modest-providers-data. Don't know about the license and availability though. Isn't something like this in Anjal? IIRC I talked with Srini about this...
I offer to write a small pyton script that extracts data from the mail configuration and creates a .ini oder xml files. This script could be run on several computers and collect the data we need. Advantages: - The data is verified to work - It is very simple to use, everyone could contribute Questions: - Do you want such a program ? - What are the input mail clients. Evolution ? Maybe Thunderbird ? - What DB format do you want ? .Ini or XML ? (Should be text - the user should be able to check if any secrets data like passwords are in there) Even if there are quite good databases out there, it could be a good additional source of data.
I checked the Modest and Anjal source code. Modest has a db of about 10 email providers. The db seems to be copyrighted....with only 10 entries it would no help a lot anyways. But it is good to have a look at which data is needed. Anjal has 4 providers, defined in the source code Does anyone have a good idea where to get lots of good data from ?
Can you please tell me, which infromation will be needed for each mail provider ? I will create a database. I have an own list of interesting settings, but I am not sure if I got everything relevant on it.
> Modest has a db of about 10 email providers. I doubt. Where did you get that info? Any URL? Yes, it is copyrighted. Which does not mean that one cannot ask the copyright holders for a licence... What comes to my mind is: * Country * Providername * SMTP server address * IMAP or POP3 server address * Auth mechanism * Encryption: None/SSL/TLS
Created attachment 142548 [details] please comment this provider database
I just added an example provider db I created. Please send me your wishes/comments. The modest db is in src/fallback-provider-data.keyfile (2723 bytes large)...not really large.
Information from thunderbird: They will have a similar feature in 3.0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422814 Their collection of provider data is here: https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/ A description of this data is here https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailServerList
Hmm, I'd prefer to have a Country setting as many settings are country-specific. But maybe I'm to used to using Modest. Anyway, good work!
I would suggest to use the thunderbird database format. What is your opinion ? It would not be so much work, because the database I have was automatically created by a script I wrote. I will just have to change the output format/write a translation tool.
So, the database in comment 8 - where does the data come from? Just wondering that it lists centrum.sk but not centrum.cz, and that seznam.cz and email.cz are missing (biggest freemail providers here in Czech Republic).
I created a quick-and-dirty python script. This did brute force about 3000 Mail providers (I used spam databases as input). This resulted in about 300 complete entries (in and outgoing mail). It is a proof that creating a database this way is possible, but some providers have very strange settings that can not be guessed. These will have to be added manually. But 300 is a very good start. What do you think ?
*** Bug 576042 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Downstream bug report [1] about hotmail account creation, that it should use user's email as user name, not only the part before '@' from the email. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=596566
duplicate of bug 636214 ?
Should be fixed by bug 636214 nowadays. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 636214 ***