Subject: pine IMAP -- turning off rsh attempts

From: [email-masked] (Logan Shaw)
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 06:05:24 GMT

Hi, I use pine as my e-mail program, and it's great.

One of the mailboxes I access is available through a direct IMAP
connection, though I cannot login to the machine directly with "rlogin"
or "rsh" (probably due to something like TCP wrappers).

The problem is that when I do an "rsh mailhost", it takes something like
5 or 10 seconds for me to get a "connection refused" message back, and
when opening an IMAP folder, pine seems to try doing the equivalent of

	rsh mailhost exec /etc/rimapd

before the equivalent of

	telnet mailhost imap

The result is that I must wait 5 or 10 seconds for the rsh to fail
every time I open the mailbox.  This is annoying when I use the TAB
key to scan my many mailboxes for unread messages.

So, my question is whether there's a way to tell pine that a folder
is accessible through IMAP but not through rsh'ed imap, preferably
on a folder-by-folder basis, i.e. something like this:

	{mailhost/user=me/norsh}INBOX

where the "norsh" is the fictitious flag I just made up that would tell
pine not to attempt to use the rsh command (since it's always always
always always going to fail).

E-mail replies would be appreciated.

  - Logan
--
Logan Shaw, Unix Systems Administrator
"everybody / loves to see / justice done / on somebody else" (Bruce Cockburn)

---

From: "Steve \"Stevers!\" Coile" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 14:01:49 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 10 Apr 1997, Logan Shaw wrote:
[...]
>always always going to fail).

{mailhost:143/user=me}INBOX

--
    Steve Coile           P a t r i o t  N e t      Systems Engineering
 [email-masked]      Patriot Computer Group        (703) 277-7737

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 14:05:33 +0100 (BST)

The simplest way of suppressing Pine's attempt to use rsh to establish the
IMAP connection is to append ":143" to the hostname in the folder
specification.  (If the IMAP server is running on some other,
non-standard, port then use its number instead.)  Thus:

	{imap.your.machine:143}inbox

If you want to turn off the rsh use for _all_ of your IMAP connections
then edit your .pinerc file and set the "rsh-open-timeout" variable to the
value 0.  (You can't do this through Pine's Setup Configuration screen as
it is not something users are expected to do often.)

Alternatively, and perhaps better from your point of view, is to ask the
Systems Administrator of the IMAP server whether they will consider
setting up a pre-authenticated IMAP service.  To do this they will need
to:
	1.  Set up a symbolic link from /etc/rimapd to their real IMAP
	    daemon executable.
	2.  Enable rsh access for you (and others).

If they don't want people being able to rsh into their IMAP server machine
and executing other commands there they may have to write a little
"blocker" program to use instead of a normal shell for the users.  This is
the route we have taken; the blocker program only allows /etc/rimapd
command to be given.

Cheers,

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
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