• Hi, Pleskians! We are running a UX testing of our upcoming product intended for server management and monitoring.
    We would like to invite you to have a call with us and have some fun checking our prototype. The agenda is pretty simple - we bring new design and some scenarios that you need to walk through and succeed. We will be watching and taking insights for further development of the design.
    If you would like to participate, please use this link to book a meeting. We will sent the link to the clickable prototype at the meeting.
  • Our UX team believes in the in the power of direct feedback and would like to invite you to participate in interviews, tests, and surveys.
    To stay in the loop and never miss an opportunity to share your thoughts, please subscribe to our UX research program. If you were previously part of the Plesk UX research program, please re-subscribe to continue receiving our invitations.
  • The Horde webmail has been deprecated. Its complete removal is scheduled for April 2025. For details and recommended actions, see the Feature and Deprecation Plan.

Question Plesk AutoDiscover working but Outlook does not recognize the settings

vaelu

Basic Pleskian
Hello Pleskians

We are already into this AutoDiscover topic for a long time. Two years ago we created our own AutoDiscover config for our customers because they were in need of it and Plesk did not have this feature back then.
Then we have worked with the Plesk developers side a side when the feature was developed and I'm really happy to see that the feature is now stable and working, since it was not properly working in the first version of Plesk AutoDiscover.

We have set up 3 different VMs to test the behavior:
  • Outlook 2013
  • Outlook 2016
  • Outlook 2019/365
Since all our customers are using the same domain as mailserver and not their own domain, we had to change the incoming and outgoing server for AutoDiscover. We did this first with a script which replaces the template files in /opt/psa/admin/htdocs/mailconfig after every update. Now it is possible to change these settings via Panel.ini (explained here) and that's pretty cool.

Unfortunately there is still not everything working, but I personally think that the problem is on Microsoft's side. I'm posting this that we can start a discussion about the AutoDiscover behavior with IMAP servers in Outlook hosted with Plesk.

How I've already written above, our customers are using a unified domain for the mailserver. That means when customer XYZ with domain customer.xyz has the email [email protected] the correct mail settings for him would be the following in our case:
  • Incoming mailserver: mail.ourdomain.tld
  • Incoming port: 993
  • Incoming protocol: SSL/TLS
  • Outgoing mailserver: mail.ourdomain.tld
  • Outgoing port: 465
  • Outgoing protocol: SSL/TLS
  • Username: [email protected]
Now we noticed the following behaviour:
On Outlook 2016 and newer (with the new account setup prompt - this one: Screenshot), Outlook does not even try to retrieve the settings. So no request is made to https://customer.xyz/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml and Outlook directly asks what type of mailbox it is. After selecting "IMAP" it asks for the mailserver, port and protocol.
Screenshot_2.png
This behavior is not really cool for our customers, since they then need to type all server settings in manually.

When checking the AutoDiscover settings for this domain, it does work perfectly. We have checked it with a POST request here and also with the Outlook AutoDiscover testing tool.
Screenshot_1.png
(Translation: Successful)

Does anyone know more about this? I hope I can start a good discussion here about AutoDiscover.
 
Last edited:
I do bump this, because I think it would be very interesting for everyone to discuss.
 
Back
Top