Apple Mail SMTP Auth problems. help?

[jamesthoms]

I've removed the PLAIN authenticator.
Now mail.app users are able to connect and send email just fine.

It doesn't seem to have affected Outlook, or Outlook Express users either...
They use the LOGIN method.

Eudora is still up in the air.. I'm not sure if anyone's using it so I haven't had a chance to test.

Thanks,

James

 

[techmonkey]

I've removed the PLAIN authenticator.
Now mail.app users are able to connect and send email just fine.

I am having the same problem. Can you explain what this plain authenticator is and how I remove it?

I have used this mail client on Cpanel, Plesk, and Ensim and this is the first time I have had this problem.

 

[jamesthoms]

How to remove plain authenticator

It's easy to remove:
Just go to your exim.conf file.
Usually /etc/exim.conf

And comment out plain.
Since I've done this mail.app works...
I haven't received any complaints from anyone else so I guess it was never really needed in the first place.


begin authenticators

login:
driver = plaintext
public_name = LOGIN
server_prompts = "Username:: : Password::"
server_condition = "${perl{smtpauth}}"
server_set_id = $1


#plain:
# driver = plaintext
# public_name = PLAIN
# server_condition = "${perl{smtpauth}}"
# server_set_id = $2

 

[techmonkey]

That did the trick. Thanks!

 

[Yikes2000]

Re: CRAM-MD5 with Exim

I've been trying to get Cram-md5 authentication working using DA and exim...

FYI, DA doesn't store plain passwords, so Exim's CRAM-MD5 authentication is out of the question for SMTP (server). From Exim documentation:

server_secret: When the server receives the client's response, the user name is placed in the expansion variable $1, and server_secret is expanded to obtain the password for that user. The server then computes the CRAM-MD5 digest that the client should have sent, and checks that it received the correct string. If the expansion of server_secret is forced to fail, authentication fails. If the expansion fails for some other reason, a temporary error code is returned to the client.

lookup_cram:
driver = cram_md5
public_name = CRAM-MD5
server_secret = ${lookup{$1}lsearch{/etc/authpwd}{$value}fail}
server_set_id = $1

Luckily STARTTLS is available with Exim. You can also use Stunnel with SMTP (along with POP3 and IMAP) which wraps SSL around these services.