[Dovecot] Passwordless auth?

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> /dev/rob0 <rob0 at gmx.co.uk>:

> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 04:10:01PM -0700,
>    Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
>> I'd love to hear about any other ways people have thought about
>> to do this.  Any ideas?

> Are you familiar with the mutt(1) MUA? I use it with a:
>     set tunnel="MAILDIR=~/Mail/ /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap"
> So it speaks IMAP, but to its own /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap process, 
> not through a network socket.

Gnus can do the same thing, ie. run the daemon as its own subprocess (I
used to do that back when I was running UoW imapd in the late 1990-ies,
early 2000-ies).

Gnus can also run ssh in a subprocess, that ssh-es into the mail server,
and then starts the imap daemon as a program on the other side, and
communicate with IMAP over the SSH connection.  I've done that as well.

Of course, both of those was with the old nnimap backend.

(And Gnus probably doesn't classify as a "standard imap client")