UW IMAP C-CLIENT 2007e FOR DEBIAN
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Plaintext logins
================
By default, plaintext logins are disabled unless you are using SSL or TLS.
This was done upstream to follow security recommendations by IETF (The Internet
Engineering Task Force).
If you absolutely must use plaintext passwords, you will need to use the
semi-official /etc/c-client.cf
The upstream author gives dire warnings about using this functionality but it
works and is pretty stable. See /usr/share/doc/libc-client2007e/imaprc.txt.gz
for further information. You specifically want to:
set disable-plaintext nil
CRAM-MD5 SASL authentication
============================
To enable it you need to have a file called /etc/cram-md5.pwd See
/usr/share/doc/libc-client2007e/md5.txt for information on how to set this up.
An ancient version of this package installed an empty /etc/cram-md5.pwd.
Although this ill-advised move was fixed quickly, because it was marked as
a conffile, you may still have it around. As a result, your users may
not be able to login. The fix is to either delete this file or populate it
with passwords as explained in /usr/share/doc/libc-client2007e/md5.txt .
Beware that even though CRAM-MD5 stores passwords encrypted, it is treated
as plaintext, so the above restrictrictions about "Plaintext logins" apply.
Default mailbox location
========================
As of version 4.5-8, the mailbox root is back to being $HOME. I apologize
for the inconvenience I have caused, but however I keep it, it is going to
annoy someone or the other. $HOME is better because:
a) most of the bug reports complain about it.
b) That's what the upstream distribution does. So it's less of a
maintenance headache for me.
c) It's what most people expect (Principle of least surprise.)
d) The reasoning behind the previous change was bogus anyway.
Please be sure to check your setup to see if there is anything that might
be affected by this change. (Procmail rules are onething that immediately
comes to mind.
One problem with $HOME being the mailbox root is every file in that
directory will show up as a folder by default. To reduce clutter select
your imap clients "Show only subscribed folders" option. (Most clients
have one.) Most also have an option to set "server path" or something
similar. You can set this to $HOME/mail or another directory of your
choosing if you want to keep all your folders together in one place.
If you really, really want to make the IMAP server set the mailbox root to
$HOME/mail or any other place for that matter, see the topic above on
plaintext passwords for how to tweak settings locally by the use of
/etc/c-client.cf. You will need something like this:
set mail-subdirectory mail
Alternatively you can see the toplevel Makefile in the source, set
MAILSUBDIR to your choice and recompile.
mbox driver
===========
This package has the mbox driver enabled which means that if there is a
file in your $HOME directory called mbox it will be treated as your inbox
and all mail in your system inbox (/var/mail/<your login>) will
immediately be transferred there on access.
[Thanks to Brock Rozen for help with the above comments]
RestrictedBox option enabled
============================
Since july 2003 c-client has been compiled with the option "restrictedBox"
enabled, so that paths starting with ".." or "/" are disallowed.
In most situations this should cause no problems, but in case you suspect
to need the default behaviour (which can be considered a security issue,
since it allows access to /etc/passwd) try adding the following to
/etc/c-client.cf (and read other remarks about that file earlier in this
document):
set restrictedBox NIL
Maildir support
===============
Earlier releases included a patch to support maildir format mailboxes,
but that patch was not freely licensed and its author has explicitly
requested its removal. No alternative reliable Maildir patch is known
to exist currently.
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>, Sun, 20 Oct 2002 11:23:00 -0400
Updates: Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> Sat, 15 Mar 2003 21:10:00 +0100
-- Magnus Holmgren <holmgren@debian.org>, Sun, 19 Oct 2014 23:02:53 +0200
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