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Is there a best way to provide email hosting such that email clients like Outlook and Mac Mail can automatically configure themselves given limited information (email + password)?

I'm guessing it might have to do with DNS entries - using [smtp|pop|imap].example.com, but I'd rather not guess if this is documented somewhere.

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Can you explain this a little more? What exactly do you mean by "automatically configure themselves"? – squillman Aug 13 '09 at 18:52
If I go into Mac Mail and add a new account, there's an option to have the email client automatically set the account up. I only put in my name, email address and password and it tries to figure out all the other settings. I believe Outlook has the same feature. – William Jens Aug 13 '09 at 18:56
Ah. Interesting, never worked with Mac Mail before so didn't realize. Outlook does not have this, unless it's part of Outlook 2007. – squillman Aug 13 '09 at 19:55
Looks like the auto-configure is there for Outlook 2007, but it's specifically related to Exchange 2007 (feature is called Autodiscovery and it's an Exchange feature). msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/… – squillman Aug 13 '09 at 19:57
My hosted provider uses this. It has "issues"...such as ONLY outlook 2007, and IE 8 isn't supported (or wasn't 2 weeks ago) – Matt Simmons Aug 13 '09 at 20:35
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The latest versions of Thunderbird support something like this, but it's entirely a client-side trick. There are some semi-accepted ways to auto configure web browser proxies via DHCP, but I know of no way to do this for any common mail clients.

If you find a more satisfactory answer, it will be very email client specific. So you might try searching (or re-asking) for the specific mail client(s) you need to support.

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