[Dovecot] SMTP Client authentication to remote Postfix/Dovecot

[Christian Benke]

Hello!

This is probably another basic question and i'm not even sure if it's
something where Dovecot is involved, but i'll give it a shot.

So i've setup Postfix with Dovecot and system-auth on my remote
server. So far it looks like everything is working fine and dandy via
SASL(PLAIN) and TLS.

I'm just not happy about my local SMTP client settings. I'm going to
try to work with mutt in the future, so i need a local MTA - i've
decided to try it with Postfix.
This works so far and i can send mails with mutt. However - my setup
relies on smtp_sasl_password_maps for authentication.

I'm not too happy to have plaintext-passwords of remote systems lying
around on my local filesystem. It doesn't really ease my mind that the
file is readable by root only, this doesn't help if my laptop's
harddisk gets mounted elsewhere.

Are there alternatives or better ways to do SMTP authentication?

http://www.postfix.org/SASL_README.html#server_cyrus_comm says:
> saslauthd can verify the SMTP client credentials by using them to log into an IMAP server

So i have my mutt-client which is logged in to the remote Dovecot
IMAP. Mutt uses the local MTA to send the mail. Is there some way to
tell the local postfix or a local dovecot to authenticate the
SMTP-Session via the existing IMAP-login? Or some other way where i at
least don't rely on plaintext passwords but secure, encrypted hashes?

Sorry if this is a redundant thread, "smtp client" authentication
site:dovecot.org/list' and the likes are not exactly the most
rewarding or unique search terms unfortunately.

Thanks,
Christian


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Central Asia by bike, starting May 2013 - http://poab.org