Subject: Pine and IMAP

From: Eric Huss <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 02:29:27 -0500 (CDT)

I am trying to set up an IMAP server (University of Washington version),
however when trying to access it from pine, it is very slow in connecting.
I have tried a variety of machines running different versions of pine.
The oddest thing is that pine 3.91 running on an old Linux machine has no
delay associated with it.  All other versions take about a minute to log
in (when pine starts, it says opening inbox with the rotating status
bar)..  Telneting directly to the IMAP port and manually logging in I can
see that it is running fine and fast.  The mailbox is small (normally
empty)..

I am just curious what pine is doing while it is sitting there, and how
can I fix it so it doesn't take so long to load up.  I tried it with level
9 debugging turned on, and did not see anything out of the ordinary in the
debug file.

Any help would greatly be appreciated.

-Eric

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 1997 09:45:56 +0100

Hi -

I think this sounds as if your Pine session is trying to establish a
"pre-suthenticated" IMAP connection (to avoid the need for you to type in
your username and password), before falling back to a conventional
connection to port 143 (whereupon it prompts you for username and
password).

Assuming you have rsh access to the host your IMAP service runs on you may
like to set up the pre-authenticated version of the IMAP daemon.  This is
done very simply: just make a symbolic link so that the filename
/etc/rimapd points to your real IMAP server executable.  Then test it by,
from the machine you use Pine on, giving a command of the form:

    rsh imap.mysite.mydomain exec /etc/rimapd

You should get a welcome banner which includes something about the
connection being pre-authenticated.

If you don't want to set this up, or don't allow rsh access to the IMAP
server host, you instead need to configure Pine to avoid trying to
establish a pre-authenticated connection and instead just go straight for a
conventional connection to port 143.

There are two ways you can do this:

1.  On a per-IMAP-server basis...

Simply alter the mailbox specification to include the explicit port number
after the machine IP name.  For example:

    inbox-path = {imap.mysite.mydomain:143}INBOX

This method allows you to avoid the pre-authenticated connections for some
servers, but retain them for others.

2.  If instead you just want to turn off all attempts at
pre-authentication, for any and all IMAP servers you may link to...

Edit the Pine settings file ($HOME/.pinerc for UNIX Pine) and set the
"rsh-open-timeout" variable to zero.

(You have to do this by editting the file directly; because it is quite an
unusual thing to alter there is no user interface to alter it in the Setup
Configuration screen (if memory serves).  This can, of course, be set in
the systemwide pine.conf file if you so wish.)

Cheers,

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/

* Unsolicited commercial e-mail is NOT welcome at this e-mail address. *