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Bug 590523 - Simplify account creation by settings db
Simplify account creation by settings db
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 636214
Product: evolution
Classification: Applications
Component: Mailer
2.26.x (obsolete)
Other All
: Normal enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: evolution-mail-maintainers
Evolution QA team
: 576042 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2009-08-02 13:16 UTC by Thorsten Sick
Modified: 2012-06-28 15:52 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: Unversioned Enhancement


Attachments
please comment this provider database (130.23 KB, text/plain)
2009-09-05 18:30 UTC, Thorsten Sick
Details

Description Thorsten Sick 2009-08-02 13:16:18 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.
Comment 1 Matthew Barnes 2009-08-02 13:18:18 UTC
(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?
Comment 2 Thorsten Sick 2009-08-02 13:37:02 UTC
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 :-)
Comment 3 André Klapper 2009-08-03 09:48:11 UTC
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...
Comment 4 Thorsten Sick 2009-08-06 06:27:19 UTC
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.
Comment 5 Thorsten Sick 2009-08-20 16:42:00 UTC
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 ?
Comment 6 Thorsten Sick 2009-08-28 15:59:14 UTC
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.
Comment 7 André Klapper 2009-08-28 17:56:27 UTC
> 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
Comment 8 Thorsten Sick 2009-09-05 18:30:17 UTC
Created attachment 142548 [details]
please comment this provider database
Comment 9 Thorsten Sick 2009-09-05 18:32:12 UTC
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.
Comment 10 Thorsten Sick 2009-09-06 07:47:04 UTC
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
Comment 11 André Klapper 2009-09-06 13:05:41 UTC
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!
Comment 12 Thorsten Sick 2009-09-06 18:22:20 UTC
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.
Comment 13 André Klapper 2009-09-06 18:38:03 UTC
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).
Comment 14 Thorsten Sick 2009-09-06 19:00:14 UTC
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 ?
Comment 15 Akhil Laddha 2009-10-28 06:59:25 UTC
*** Bug 576042 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 16 Milan Crha 2010-05-27 09:57:09 UTC
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
Comment 17 Akhil Laddha 2012-01-23 09:33:43 UTC
duplicate of bug 636214 ?
Comment 18 André Klapper 2012-06-28 15:52:14 UTC
Should be fixed by bug 636214 nowadays.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 636214 ***