An email address and a password is enough
Adding a mail account used to mean an IMAP host, an SMTP host, two ports and two encryption settings — a form most people cannot fill in about their own mailbox. All of it is knowable, so Rutba Office works it out.
· 3 min read
Ask most people for their IMAP server and you will get a blank look — reasonably. It is not something anybody should need to know about their own mailbox, and yet for twenty years desktop mail applications have opened with exactly that form: incoming host, outgoing host, two ports, SSL or STARTTLS, twice.
Every one of those answers already exists somewhere public. So adding an account to Rutba Office’s Mail now asks for an address and a password, and works the rest out.
Where the answer is, in the order we ask
- A table of the providers most people use. If the address ends in a domain everybody recognises, the settings are known.
- The domain’s MX records. Mail hosted at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Zoho, Fastmail or iCloud under a company’s own domain says so there — an address at a small firm is often a well-known provider in disguise.
- SRV records, the standard way a domain publishes its own mail servers.
- Autoconfig documents, which some providers publish for exactly this.
- Autodiscover, the equivalent Microsoft’s ecosystem uses.
Asked in that order, an address is usually enough on its own. When none of them answers, the dialog falls back to the form — but as the exception, not as the front door.
It is all knowable. A form that asks a person for something the internet already publishes is a form that has not looked.
When a provider wants a browser, not a password
Some providers no longer accept a password from a mail application at all; they want you to sign in through their own page. Where that is the case the dialog offers that instead of asking for a password that would only be refused.
Wherever a password is used, it goes to your operating system’s keystore — not to a file Rutba Office can read back — which is the same rule the suite has always kept about what it stores and what it sends.
And for the person setting up the whole office
The opposite case matters too. Somebody provisioning a dozen machines wants no dialog at all, so a file of accounts sets up many at once, from the dialog or from the command line. Together with Calendar and Contacts, that is most of what moving an office off a paid mail client involves.
How to open a .pst file without Outlook
A full answer, alternatives included, on the Rutba Office site.
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