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

[Ken Hornstein]

>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