Subject: IMAP password?

From: Jason Rains <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 1997 16:30:37 -0800

I am looking for a way to set the IMAP password in PINE.

I understand that the username can be set in the .pinerc with...
   inbox-path={mailserver.domain.com/username}INBOX 
and I am looking for a similar method of setting the password.

My ultimate goal is for users to be able to access a remote mailbox as if
it were local without the hassle of entering a username and password every
time they use PINE.

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 09:27:46 +0000 (GMT)

Sigh... Pine is a cross-platform product: are you talking about Pine on
UNIX, or PC-Pine?

If you are talking about PC-Pine then create an (empty) file called
pine.pwd in the same directory as your pinerc file.  PC-Pine will then
allow you to save your password in a (lightly) encrypted form within that
file.  [This is described in Pine's Technical Notes file.]

If you are talking about UNIX Pine then a different mechanism is used
based on UNIX's "rsh" mechanism.  Basically you need to arrange for your
IMAP server to have two things:

1.  To trust hosts on which people run Pine to use the rsh mechanism to
    connect to the machine on which the IMAP server runs: eg,
	rsh imap.your.site
    works.  (Clue: You probably want to set up a hosts.equiv file on it
    to list UNIX machines allowed to connect, or else set up a .rhosts
    file for each individual user (hassle to do and to maintain).)

2.  A symbolic link is made so that /etc/rimapd points to the real imapd
    executable.

Pine will then use this rsh-based pre-authenticated method of connecting
to your IMAP server automatically (unless you have deliberately turned the
attempt off in your Pine settings file).

Hint:  Many sites have a dedicated machine running their IMAP service.
Consequently they don't want random people being able to execute arbitrary
commands on the IMAP server.  A solution is to set the users' shell on the
IMAP server machine to execute a minimal blocker program which only allows
the /etc/rimapd program to be run.

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. *