Re: [Nmh-workers] extending nmh for smtps support?

[Ken Hornstein]

>I see that at http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers, port 465 is called
>"urd", but on my Mandriva 2009.1 Linux system I see:
>
>address@hidden smtp]$ grep 465 /etc/services
>smtps           465/tcp                         # SMTP over SSL (TLS)
>
>I apologize for my ignorance, I actually thought that the info in my local
>/etc/services would be accurate, especially as AT&T called it the same thing.

I think others have addressed this adequately, although /etc/services
on my MacOS X system here lists port 465 as "urd".

Assuming AT&T supports it (since you expressed interest in writing the code)
I think the "right" way to do this would be via STARTTLS.

>After the EHLO response, used the base64 command to decode the prompts
>for userid and password.  My reading of sylpheed code, and watching the
>generated log file showed that it was then creating a single string that
>contained 
>
>AUTH PLAIN userid\0password
>
>where userid\0password were base64 encoded

Right, that's SASL, specifically the SASL PLAIN mechanism (part of
the EHLO response should be a line that lists all of the SASL
mechanisms, and PLAIN should be one of them).  That should Just
Work (although we probably never tested the PLAIN mechanism
specifically, but if it doesn't work then that's a bug).  I don't
think we limit the security properties to prohibit the use of PLAIN
(do we?  Just checked; we do not).  So you should not need to write
any code to make that part work.

--Ken