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[fetchmail]fetchmail newbie | ClearText passwords?

2004-04-13 04:49:00
I suspect this is an FAQ of sorts, but couldn't find an explicit answer to this one (if it exists, please set flame-throwers to 'singe only').

I recently installed fetchmail 6.2.5 on my RH 7.3 GNU/Linux box. I set up a crontab entry to have fetchmail periodically poll our central mail server (which runs both IMAP and pop3), which is configured to handle both kerberos, and TSL/SSL connections/authentication. Since I find kerberos a pain, I decided to go with the SSL route, and the pop3 protocol.

I set up my .fetchmailrc to pull things off the server, and then route them through the procmail MTA on my GNU/Linux machine. My .fetchmailrc looks something like

poll machine.goes.here with proto pop3
        user xyz123 is xyzabc here
        no rewrite
        password "blah blah blah"
        ssl
        mda "/usr/bin/procmail -f -"


This works fine, but I'm wondering about the security of having my password sitting in plaint text in my .fetchmailrc file. Are there obvious things I could do to eliminate the need to do this? Some way to interface fetchmail with pgp, or some such?

Thanks in advance - and again, apologies if this is an "old question".