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There are some questions on serverfault about setting up Thunderbird autoconfiguration and Outlook autodiscovery, but when using the default email client on Android (tested on three phones - v4.4 and v5), it still requires manual setup.

When I enter the email address and password and touch "Next" it says "Checking auto setup information..." but it doesn't make any contact with the email server (I watched traffic on ports 80, 443, 587, 993).

So what protocol does the Android email client use for its autodiscovery? Where is it documented?

user109322
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You appear to have hit a long-standing issue in Android. In particular Android will only load the autodiscover XML over HTTPS. If you serve it over HTTP then Android will refuse to even attempt to use it.

As described in the bug, Android does not use DNS SRV records to locate mail services.

Michael Hampton
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  • Wow, that's absurd that bug is not yet fixed. But it isn't my issue. I watched port 443 and nothing came, so step 1 isn't even working. I'm not firewalled that I know of (tried on two different networks), but this does lead me to believe something is blocking the request? How would I diagnose the outgoing request? – user109322 May 19 '15 at 20:02
  • I would watch _all_ traffic and then look through it for anything interesting. – Michael Hampton May 19 '15 at 20:03
  • I just did exactly that on the server side (grep for phone's IP addr), but ZERO packets come from the phone. Is there an app I should use on the phone side to sniff? Seems strange, especially since there is another working IMAP account configured in the email client. – user109322 May 19 '15 at 20:11
  • Well, that's bizarre. Is it even connected to Wi-Fi? – Michael Hampton May 19 '15 at 20:15
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    Yes, confirmed connection by browsing manually to the autodiscover.xml file in default browser. – user109322 May 19 '15 at 20:27
  • Update from 2017: Android won't even do `autodiscover XML`, my packet sniffer only shows one attempt connecting to some "weird" IP on 443. – Alex G Jul 04 '17 at 22:33
  • I can confirm, this still appears to be not-a-thing. Outlook and Thunderbird both autoconfig/autodiscover just fine on our server. No hits in the logs from Android Mail. Sad-face, I love Android (mostly). What gives? – jdmayfield Oct 12 '18 at 09:52
  • @jdmayfield It probably never will be a thing, now that virtually every web site is expected to be HTTPS. – Michael Hampton Oct 12 '18 at 16:15
  • @michael That's what odd-- it should at the least work on our domains that are on https. Outlook, Thundirbird, and Apple device all seem to work with our current autoconfig/autodiscover and .mobilconfig setups, making them easy for customers to setup their email with just email address and password. I just implemented these this week, but all the ones I've tested it on work great. Outlook actually will automatically do it for currently existing setups even and adjust to the new settings if they are using old settings. For Android, auto-configure only works on Outlook from Play Store. – jdmayfield Oct 12 '18 at 22:56