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Re: exim4 authentication in etch? - SUCCESS!



Chris Davies wrote:
Thomas H. George <lists@tomgeorge.info> wrote:
|MAIN_TLS_ENABLE = true|
|AUTH_CLIENT_ALLOW_NOTLS_PASSWORDS=yes|

Chris Davies <chris-usenet@roaima.co.uk>:
What you've done there is to enable TLS (encryption), but then
immediately say that you're happy not to use encryption to protect
your username/password combination.

s. keeling <keeling@nucleus.com> wrote:
So, the answer is to avoid providers who require this?  Or is there
any alternative action he could employ?

Fair question. Re-reading the exim4 configuration code again, I can see
that MAIN_TLS_ENABLE is required. (Without it, it seems that none of
the certificate configuration settings is included.) I forgot to mention
this in my original suggestion because I've had it enabled for so long

I'm still puzzled why the OP needs the AUTH_CLIENT_ALLOW_NOTLS_PASSWORDS
setting, which I also have mis-represented above. For correction, it
allows inbound client connections to one's own server to use passwords
without TLS encryption.


This discussion makes me wonder about the iceape use of the username/password combination. For iceape it is simple and easy to enter the information yet for me the exim4 setup required a lot of research which suggests possible security issues. First, is there a security issue? I am only providing the username/password without TLS when specifically addressing the verizon server and asking access to the internet to send a message. To collect messages from my ISP I do not need to do this. For example, the fetchmail setup required the ISP username and password and then retrieved messages before I ever configured exim4. In fact, I only tried to configure and use exim4 because I rather liked using fetchmail and mutt to read postings to the debian-user list. As long as I am just reading the postings nothing more needs to be done. It is only when I wish to reply to the list from mutt that exim4 is required. If, instead, I abandon fetchmail and mutt and use iceape to read and reply to postings I never need exim4 at all.

Should I worry about this?

Tom


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