fetchmail and plain text password

[Victor Sudakov]

Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
> I use fetchmail
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail-fetchmail.html
> to download all my mail from the Uni mail
> server to my fbsd box.
> 
> I typically run it in daemon mode, which requires
> having my mail server password in plain text in .fetchmailrc
> 
> I'm a little worried about the security of having
> my password in plain text on the system.

If your Uni mail server supports Kerberos, the only line in your
~/.fetchmailrc could be something like

poll mail.yourserver.edu auth gssapi

And you have to periodically refresh the Kerberos ticket. Works for me
(I download mail from a Communigate Pro mail server).

Of course root can have access to your Kerberos credentials cache, but
I think it would be of more limited use than a plain text password.

Actually my complete ~/.fetchmailrc is 

============================
defaults
        protocol pop3 mda "/usr/local/bin/procmail -d %T" nokeep fetchall
        set syslog

poll mail.sibptus.tomsk.ru auth gssapi
============================

-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
sip:sudakov at sibptus.tomsk.ru