On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 04:32:47PM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Thursday, September 20 at 09:51 PM, quoth Chris G:
> >Ah, sorry, I'm confused - I was confusing authentication with
> >encryption. My server requires my name and password but the
> >connection isn't encrypted.
>
> Ohhhh, I get it. In that case, I know exactly why mutt requires SASL:
> because that's the library it uses to transform your username and
> password into a form that an SMTP server will accept, whether that be
> base64-encoding it, or whatever. SASL isn't a connection-encryption
> library (that would be something like gnutls or openssl), it's an
> authentication encoding library. SASL stands for "Simple
> Authentication and Security Layer." Thus, mutt doesn't have to
> implement LOGIN, PLAIN, SKEY, CRAM-MD5, or whatever else, but can rely
> on the SASL library to handle such details. A more complete
> explanation of the SASL concept is here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Authentication_and_Security_Layer
>
That explains it all, thank you, now I understand.
It was actually easier to build mutt with SASL than I expected because
the SASL libraries are in a default build of Fedora 7 (well, they were
in the one I've been given to use at work) and just putting:-
--with-sasl
was all that was needed. Since --help gave:-
--with-sasl=PFX Use Cyrus SASL 2 network security library
I was thinking it was a rarely used library that I would have to build
myself and tell mutt where it was.
Thanks for the help (and patience) everybody.
--
Chris Green
