bug#20078: imap with openssl

[William F Hammond]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> wrote:

Thanks for the report.
I think basically what you are talking about is the same as

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=766397

which was forwarded to emacs-devel, which is a great way to ensure
things get lost, so it's good to have an actual bug report for it now.

The discussion is here, but AFAICS nothing actually happened:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-10/msg00803.html

Debian is not really the place to talk about this kind of issue for emacs/gnus.

But I note in the Debian thread that Richard Stallman, based on his reading, made the same point about avoiding the options ssl3 and ssl2 with s_client though he did not ask for the abandonment of s_client or of imap.el.

There's discussion in those threads about whether 'anyone' still uses imap.el and its calls to external openssl.  It arises, for example, when using mail-sources with, say, nnmbox.

My 'crisis' arose in a sun/solaris system where neither starttls nor gnutls is available.  It seems that starttls is now no longer maintained (for cause) and, in my case, gnutls is not easy to build from source because of recursive library dependencies.  But openssl is available.

Would it make sense for emacs to incorporate gnutls?  That way one could be sure for a given build of emacs that it would work with gnutls.

--

William F Hammond
Email: gellmu@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/william.f.hammond
http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/