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

[Bob Carragher]

On Sat, 04 May 2013 10:21:26 -0400 Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> wrote:

> >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.

Got it.

> >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.

Okay, I see.

Yeah, I would prefer to use the more integrated flows, so I'm not
likely to switch off of fetchmail in this case.

Thanks!

                                Bob