Use Thunderbird's autoconfig ISPDB directly, not its copy

I'm a Thunderbird developer and invented the autoconfig (including the ISPDB idea, and the protocol, and developed most of its implementation, and I personally created the first version of the ISPDB with the major ISPs).

Thank you for using the autoconfig method. It is great to see the open-source world united on this. There are a large number of open-source email clients that use it.

However, you are using your own copy of the database maintained on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/api-web/tree/master/evolution/autoconfig . It appears that your ISPDB copy is 8 years old and has never been updated. This means that many configs will not work anymore, which is very much to the detriment of your end users.

To avoid that this happens again, I would suggest that you use autoconfig.thunderbird.net, e.g. https://autoconfig.thunderbird.net/v1.1/freenet.de. It's run by the Thunderbird community, which is also privacy conscious. Evolution would be welcome to use it. We'd merely appreciate a correct HTTP User-Agent header, so that we can attribute your calls, given that we see a lot of abuse.

If this is nonetheless a concern for you, and you insist on using your own server, I would urge you to at least install a cron job that updates your ISPDB copy from https://github.com/thundernest/autoconfig and run https://github.com/mozilla/ispdb/blob/master/tools/convert.py over the result, to expand the elements to separate files, for ISPs like Hotmail that have multiple domains. (Please ignore the other code on that mozilla repo, it's an old implementation of a web app that was never used.) We're not perfectly up to date with all ISP changes, either, but at least there have been a significant number of update over the years, and there are likely others to come.

For example, Yahoo was entirely broken not too long ago, and we updated it to work again.