How's Alpine meant to deal with IMAP referrals/authentication
Erik Quaeghebeur
My institution uses Cyrus IMAP with a backend murder (storage servers).
The main server sends IMAP referrals to let the MUA contact the
appropriate backend server. Other MUA's never see the name of the backend
server that stores their mailboxes, while I do (using Alpine 2.0): I get
prompted to authenticate to it separately (at some point during my
session); I have to give my username and password (not just the password).
I was wondering wether Alpine should normally be able to 're-use' the
authentication of the front-end server. I also authenticate to other IMAP
servers, with different user names/passwords, one of these other user
names is given as as the default one when I'm prompted to authenticate to
the backend server.
I've briefly looked at the RFC's governing IMAP referrals to see what
Alpine SHOULD/MUST/... do, but I get lost.
When starting Alpine with -d imap=4, triggering the backend authentication
prompt, and looking through the log, I get the following referral (only
one, anonymized):
00000025 NO [REFERRAL imap://;AUTH=*@<backend server name>.<domain>/<mailbox path>] Remote mailbox.
(After that, the authentication and me quitting Alpine is described.)
Such referrals seem to get triggered when writing something to a mailbox
(or removing the postponed-message mailbox), but not when reading messages
or mailbox listings (this last remark is based on a limited number of
observations).
TIA,
Erik
Lucas Levrel
It might not be precisely the intent of your mail, but did you consider
using the store-password-on-disk functionality? With time you'll encounter
every backend server and at last wouldn't be prompted for ID anymore.
--
LL
Erik Quaeghebeur
It's the easy way out!
Its great! (But less safe, of course.)
Lucas, thanks for waking me up,
Erik