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Re: [Nmh-workers] Setup help???

2013-05-04 09:21:33
I'd never heard of cyrus-sasl before, but I'd been installing
openssl for awhile (I forget why).  Yeah, come to think of it, MH
was never a reason I became tired of maintaining dependencies.  B-)

Cyrus-sasl is a package which provides an API to do various sorts of
authentication supported by different protocols (like SMTP & POP, which
are what we care about in our case).  You probably wouldn't have heard
of it unless you're in the middle of that stuff.

Hmm, as in "inc" will do the fetching for me (so that I won't need
to use "fetchmail" anymore)?  Oh wow, it does!  (It's been a long
time since I read the man page for inc ....  B-)  What are the
"limitations" that you hinted at?

inc can fetch email from POP server ... and in fact, it always had that
capability going back maybe a few decades.  It wasn't always compiled
in, though (more recently we made it always be compiled in).  I won't
bore you with the exact technical details, but right now inc _can_ do
encryption to the POP server _if_ you use a SASL mechanism that supports
encryption (that's how I use inc).  But most POP servers (including
the one at gmail) use TLS for encryption which currently inc doesn't
support.  There is an option to make it work; people successfully use
the -proxy switch to inc to run a program that does the TLS for you.
So yeah, you can make it work, it's just not as integrated as I would
prefer.

In fairness I must point out that there are a number of nmh users who
don't feel inc should fetch email from POP servers; they prefer using
fetchmail or an equivalent.  You can check the mailing list archives for
the discussions about that; I don't think they're worth rehashing again.
Obviously I don't agree with that view, but I would be remiss if I
didn't mention it.

--Ken

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