Re: [VM] imap-ssh and passwords

[Matthew Vernon]

Uday Reddy <address@hidden>
writes:

> Matthew Vernon writes:
>
>> I'm not sure I agree that password-based authentication is inherently 
>> less secure than public-key-based authentication, but that's getting 
>> rather off-topic, isn't it? I don't think password-based ssh logins are 
>> so dreadful an idea that VM should not support them as a policy issue or 
>> anything like that.
>
> No, we don't have any policy that VM should not support it.  That is the way
> Kyle Jones designed it.  I don't know how easy or hard it might be to add
> password-based SSH authentication.  If anybody is able to work on it and
> contribute a patch, I will be happy to incorporate it.

Further investigation suggests I was (somewhat) mistaken, but that the
ssh invocation is a bit buggy, I think.

Suppose my username on my machine running vm is alice, and my username
on my mailserver is bob. If I have:
("imap-ssh:login.mailserver.example.com:143:inbox:login:bob:*" "foo")

as my mailbox specification. If I then visit foo:inbox, then VM calls
ssh -L xxxx:login.mailserver.example.com:143 login.mailserver.example.com
...and this will try to log in as address@hidden,
which will fail. 

In fact, if I am running emacs under X, then openssh can pop up a window
to ask for a password, and so password entry isn't an issue under
X11. It cannot do this in a terminal window, however[0].

I can work around this username problem by doing something like:
(setq vm-ssh-program-switches
      '("-l" "bob")
)

...but that only works if my username is bob on /every/ mailhost I want
to imap/ssh to. I wonder if it would be better to add a username
argument to vm-setup-ssh-tunnel, and pass the username bit of the
maildrop specification to that?

>> The host concerned does not support imap/ssl, and has no plans to do so.
>
> That is ok.  But I have mentioned the solution of ssh tunneling.  Can you
> try that and see if that does the job for you?

Yes, it does.

Regards,

Matthew
[0] I'm not good enough an elisp hacker to fix this, I don't think.
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