Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh 1.2 failed in doing smtp authentication

[Peter Maydell]

Zhang Weiwu wrote:
>My sasl is cyrus-sasl 2.1.22-r2
>When sending emails, I got the following:
>
>address@hidden:/usr/local/nmh$ send -verbose -watch -sasl
>Use "/home/zhangweiwu//Mail/drafts/2"? y
> -- Posting for All Recipients --
>post: problem initializing server; [BHST] SASL base64 decode failed: another 
>step is needed in authentication
>send: message not delivered to anyone

My personal recommendation is that you should use mts: sendmail
if possible (ie if you have a working MTA on your local machine),
as it's more likely to be reliable (and isn't obliged to wait
around for ages for the server to respond). Also it means you
only need to set up the MTA once and then all mail clients will
do authentication etc right.

Anyway, for SASL, I wonder if this is the same problem as mentioned
here for mutt:

http://osdir.com/ml/security.cyrus.sasl/2006-09/msg00010.html

(If you could try with cyrus-sasl 2.1.21 that might be interesting.)

If you can use a debugger, then the way to test this would be to
put a breakpoint on the line in mts/smtp/smtp.c which calls
sasl_decode64(). Then when it hits the breakpoint, look at the
value of sm_reply.text to see whether it has any extraneous
whitespace or newlines at start or end.

I note that there are a couple of other SASL-related patches in
the bug tracking system. Since I don't use SASL at all myself
I have no way of testing whether they're sensible...

-- PMM