Tzafrir Cohen wrote:

Hi

I'm using dovecot on a LAN server. I sometimes read mail from the server itself locally with mutt and sometimes remotely with mutt or mozilla .

I would like to avoid typing my password whenever necessary but without writing a plain-text equivalent copy of it locally.

It feels quite silly to have to type the password locally becase the imapd does not know that the process is indeed a process of the user tzafrir. It has all the information it neeeds to check that.

wu-imapd has something called "pre-authentication": the imapd is run by the user unpriviliged to access mail in the user's home directory. As a bonus this works quite nicely with ssh public key authentication. I know that at least mutt and pine support running a custom command for creating an imap connection. But then again, wu-imapd is built quite, well, differently.

Any ideas?

You might look at this:

http://www.benjamin.weiss.name/mail-server.sh

It's unfinished, but I don't have to type a password when using mutt locally. note, however, that I don't allow imap from anywhere but localhost. Externally, I use imaps. It all works well with Thunderbird, as also.

I'm away next week for my RHCE course and test, I'll finish the script and write up a page on configuring Thunderbird when I get back.

HTH,

Ben