Using Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover

PLEASE NOTE: This article does NOT apply to Office365 setups.

Autodiscover is an Exchange server which enables email clients (such as Mailbird) to automatically configure themselves to work with your email server via your email address.

In order for Mailbird to use the Autodiscover service, the service has to be running and accessible over your current network connection. This can be done in two ways:

• Either by using a set of Powershell commands available in your Exchange server (more suited to system administrators)
• Or by using Outlook.

Using Powershell

You can use Windows Powershell to test whether your Autodiscover service is working correctly by using the Test-OutlookWebServices cmdlet. Note: these cmdlet comes with your Exchange server installation and are found at “C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14\Scripts” (be sure to replace v14 with your Exchange server version).

Run the following command to determine the status of your Autodiscover service:

Test-OutlookWebServices -identity: user@example.com –MailboxCredential (Get-Credential)

When prompted for credentials provide a valid email address and password. Ensure all items in the result display Success. If they don’t, something is wrong with your Exchange server configuration.

For more documentation on the Test-OutlookWebServices cmdlet you can check the Microsoft Docs. 

Using Outlook

Holding down CTRL, right click on the Outlook icon in your system tray. This will give you a few additional options including “Test Email AutoConfiguration…”. 

In the window that appears enter a set of valid credentials, make sure to leave only “Use Autodiscover” selected and click “Test”.

Next open the “Log” tab and look towards the end for a line containing “Autodiscover to [...] Succeeded”. If you don’t see such a line, something is wrong with your Exchange server configuration.

Ensuring your domain’s DNS configuration is correct

In order to determine the path to your Exchange Autodiscover service, email clients make some educated guesses and among other things they use a special DNS entry to determine the possible location of the service.

For this, you need to add a new DSN record to your domain.

Type: SRV

Name: _autodiscover._tcp.@

Value: 0 0 443 autodiscover.example.com (replace autodiscover.example.com with the subdomain + domain of your Autodiscover service)

Once this is done use the methods above to check if the Autodiscover service is working correctly. Note: DNS changes can take up to a few hours to propagate depending on your DNS provider. Give these changes enough time to propagate before testing whether the service works as expected.

Manual setup of Exchange account

If you don’t manage to get the Autodiscover service working properly or you don’t want it exposed over the internet, you can also manually configure the email account inside Mailbird. To do so, you will need to know the URL to your Exchange Web Services (EWS). 

The EWS URL is typically structured like this: https://mail.example.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx. If the URL you have ends in /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSyncNote or /OWA or /EAS, that is not your Exchange EWS URL, but a different protocol which we don’t currently support.

In order to manually specify the EWS URL, when adding an account in Mailbird and you are prompted with the “Settings found” window, simply click the “Edit server settings” link and fill in the URL in the “Server URL” field.

Notice how in the image above the server URL follows the pattern mentioned above and is on a different domain entirely compared to the email address.