Re: Opportunistic STARTTLS in smtpmail.el

[Stefan Monnier]

SM> One more thing: a user which has a ~/.authinfo.gpg but no unencrypted
SM> ~/.netrc nor ~/.authinfo should not be prompted for a password (since
SM> that would be very annoying, if in the end she doesn't need
SM> authentication).
> If the SMTP server requires authentication, how do we know
> ~/.authinfo.gpg does NOT have the password we need?

Exactly: we can only know if a var like smtpmail-use-auth tells us.

SM> I really think that trying to avoid smtpmail-use-auth is ill-advised.
> I'm not trying to avoid anything.

AFAICT, the main drive (in this discussion) to introduce
field-encryption within the unencrypted .netrc file is to avoid
introducing a smtpmail-use-auth customization.

And my point is that this customization is a necessary thing anyway.

Maybe there are still other cases where field-encryption in the
unencrypted file is worthwhile (I don't know of any), but that's
a separate discussion.

So can we add this smtpmail-use-auth, make smtpmail.el use opportunistic
STARTTLS and move on?


        Stefan