2005- 02-07
Getting pine working with STARTTLS and smtp auth.
February 7, 2005I've had smtp auth and starttls working with exim on my laptop and smart host for ages - pine just uses the usual /usr/bin/sendmail method of sending email.
The problem was that i was running exim as a daemon to get this working, and had to set it up to beleive that pointless.net was a local domain on my laptop, which made it impossible to send email to any other pointless.net user - it would try to deliver it locally on my laptop, where the user didn't exist...
This wasn't an issue for ages, but it did nag at me so I was always on the lookout for either replacing pine with something sane, or waiting until pine supported starttls and smtp auth nativly, in which case I could ditch exim localy.
I got back to looking at this today, and sure enough pine now supports all that i need.
There are good guides to setting it up here and here, so i won't repeat the mundane details.
There are two points that I had to clear up tho:
In the pine docs it talks about using /ssl as a switch to use ssl. What that actualy does is to assume that the whole smtp session from the moment it's started should be ssl encrypted, and uses the semi official port 465.
There is another switch however, /tls, which does STARTTLS, so switching to that made things work as they should
The other was that pine would always ask me for my password for smtp auth.
Now given that this is a single user box, and if anyone gets physical access they can read all my old mail anyway (all way back to 1998), so i don't really care about keeping the password safe, and having to type it in all the time is annoying, doubley so cos it's a nice long random password.
Unfortunatly there didn't appear to be a way to tell pine what my password was. After some digging around in the source i found a compile time option, PASSFILE, which specifies a file to use to cache passwords in.
It did seem to be imap specific, but after a quick edit and recompile it worked for my smtp auth password, so thats that fixed.
