Support Start > Stopping Autodiscover Requests

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We’ve occasionally heard of a rare problem where customers use mail software that incorrectly tries to make tens of thousands of web connections every day to hostnames like “autodiscover.example.com”. In particular, you might see a large number of requests to:

http://autodiscover.example.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

If you use WordPress or other software on your site that consumes CPU resources for each “404 not found” page, this can slow down your site or even cause extra fees.

If it happens to you, the simplest way to workaround it is to add a new DNS “CNAME record” that points “autodiscover.example.com” at a non-working IP address that is guaranteed to reject all connections.

We’ve reserved the special hostname reject.tigertech.net for this purpose, and we’ll be glad to set this up for you if you contact us.

What if the requests use “example.com” instead of “autodiscover.example.com”?

Some software makes requests that look like this instead:

http://example.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

This is different because the hostname is not “autodiscover.example.com”, so the tip above doesn’t block it.

Adding these lines to your site’s .htaccess file will fix it if so:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^autodiscover/autodiscover.xml$ - [forbidden,last]

Again, we’ll be happy to do this for you if you contact us. We may also automatically do it for you if your site experiences high load due to this problem.