On Wed, 24 Feb 2021 10:00:12 +0000 Bev Nicolson lumos@gmx.co.uk allegedly wrote:
<snip>
Can you take me through login again? When do I type in my password? On prompt? (I've got so far but it's not happy about this bit. I have two email addresses with my isp, by the way. I'm not sure if that makes any difference.)
Bev
I'm assuming here that you have seen a successful "CONNECTED" message - something like:
CONNECTED(00000003)
[ some stuff about the TLS certificate ]
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE LITERAL+ AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=LOGIN] Dovecot on mail.rlogin.net ready.
as I gave in my example of my test to my server. Note the bit about capabilities of the IMAP server followed by the IMAP server "ready" message (though that message is entirely configurable (in dovecot anyway) and could say anything at all).
After that OK message, you need to log in with the email address you are testing immediately followed by the password for that address on the same line. So if you have two email addresses (at say gmail.com) of the form:
bev1@gmail.com and bev2@gmail.com and you want to test bev1 then you would type:
a001 login bev1@gmail.com password-for-bev1@gmail.com
If that is successful then you should get the
OK - (blah, blah, blah capabilities) logged in
message.
If you do not see any of that, then let us know (abscuring any personal authentication details of course) and I'll have a look for you. The default authentication mechanism for dovecot is "plain" where the plaintext password is passed to the server at authentication time. This used to be a problem before TLS protected exchanges so there are umpteen others, Dovecot allows for fourteen[1] non-plaintext auth mechanisms and your system may be different to mine. And of course, the IMAP server may not be dovecot - cyrus is a popular alternative.
[1] See https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/authentication/authentication_m...
Mick
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