fetchmail and plain text password

[Anton Shterenlikht]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 04:53:24PM +0000, RW wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:44:21 +0000
> Anton Shterenlikht <mexas at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
> > I might be wrong, but that's my understanding.
> > So programs like fetchmail that actually connect to their
> > imap server and download mail to local boxes are probably
> > not very welcome.
> 
> You probably are wrong, it's more a case of your not using it's full
> potential. I'm not really sure why you are doing it this way, I do
> something simailar, but only because I'm interested in spam-filtering.
> 
> Why not just point your preferred mail client at the imap server?
> That way you can access your mail from anywhere (probably via
> webmail too)  Some imap clients, such as thunderbird and kmail, will
> let you store your server passworks encrypted to a master-password, so
> even root can't read them.  The IMAP server is probably more reliable
> too.

Are you saying I can make mutt read mail directly from the imap
server? Without fetchmail?

> If you want a local copy, or use a client with poor imap support, then
> offlineimap is pretty good.
> 
> 
> BTW personally I use  getmail instead of fetchmail, I've not used
> fetchmail much, but I've read a lot of bad things about it - some of
> which are mentioned here: 
> 
> http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why

interesting..

none of this is mentioned in the handbook:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail-fetchmail.html


-- 
Anton Shterenlikht
Room 2.6, Queen's Building
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