Auto-discovery for Outlook (via IMAP / POP3)

Updated: October 5, 2022

The following article will show you how to configure auto-discovery for Microsoft Outlook by updating the axigen.cfg file.

Note: This article was built using Outlook 2016.

For Outlook 2010, please review Microsoft documentation on automatic user account configurations here.

This article was built on the following Axigen environment:

Single server
Server level settings
Autogenerated SSL certificates for POP3S, IMAPS, SMTPS
Signed SSL certificate for HTTPS

You can configure Auto-discovery in Axigen for Microsoft Outlook 2016 by simply following these steps:

1. Open axigen.cfg

2. Set the flags that enable Auto-discovery to “yes” for the protocols you wish to enable and provide the hostnames and ports corresponding to the IMAP(S), POP(S), and SMTP(S) protocols to be advertised by the Auto-discovery feature.

3. In your DNS server, configure an entry with the name autodiscover.youremaildomain.tld, such as:

4. Test your configuration with Outlook and the Axigen logs

Open Microsoft Outlook and go to "Add Account"
Provide your Name, email address and password and click "Next"

Click on "Finish" after the Auto-discovery process is completed.

In the background, an HTTPS POST request is initiated:

Microsoft Outlook 2016 initiates only HTTPS requests for Auto-discovery.

If HTTPS Auto-discovery connection failed (using POST), it will failover on HTTP (using GET) - this will also fail as Axigen does not support this method.

The request is traceable in everything.txt (log level set to "Protocol Communication") and should be similar to: