[25298] in Athena Bugs
Re: Emacs and SMTP Authentication
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Nov 4 14:48:13 2003
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
To: Tom Cavin <cavin@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <16295.60202.583910.417456@lap1-wccf.mit.edu>
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Date: 04 Nov 2003 14:44:45 -0500
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On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 13:08, Tom Cavin wrote:
> If I remember the prediction correctly, according to Jeff Schiller we are
> likely to have some of the big players (AOL, et. al.) ask for a limited
> number of designanted mail servers which they would whitelist, and they
> would blacklist everything else. Presumably, outgoing would be on the
> whitelist. The condition for the whitelist entry would probably include
> some form of authentication to reduce the spam.
Maybe. If that happens, we'll have to adjust our strategy. (But we
won't be the only ones at MIT affected by such a change; I believe there
are already plenty of machines doing direct mail delivery.)
> It may be worth setting the timeout for the "mail delayed, will keep
> trying, no user action needed" message to a very short period. It won't
> help with the authentication, but it will let users know there has been a
> delay.
I don't think we'll be doing that. A delay can happen anywhere along
the delivery path, and our environment has no special reason to alter
the tradeoff between annoyance and informativeness.
> I don't have any real info to the contrary except insofar as I currently
> get my mail in Emacs using IMAP-SSL with stunnel from the crypto locker,
> and use mailcrypt / GPG when needed. I hadn't realized there was a problem
> with SSL or GSSAPI in elisp, but then I don't know a whole lot about the
> Emacs internals or packages.
Cryptographic algorithms generally need to be implemented in a compiled
language to perform acceptably. A few emacs packages can do
cryptographic authentication using external programs (for example, the
IMAP support in gnus can use "imtest" from the Cyrus SASL suite), but
based on outside information, even the most current upstream release of
smtpmail.el doesn't appear to have any support for that. See
<http://tinyurl.com/tn8n>.
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