Re: [exim] Why doesn't Exim authenticate against IMAP direct…

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Author: Fred Viles
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] Why doesn't Exim authenticate against IMAP directly?
On 2 Aug 2005 at 7:40, Marc Perkel wrote about
    "Re: [exim] Why doesn't Exim authent":


|...
| How do you get Exim to talk to a Dovecot backend.


I don't know what you mean by a "Dovecot backend", but nobody has
suggested that exim can "talk to" Dovecot.

| >I already asked you two times, why you
| >need such a feature - you didn't answer that question yet, besides of
| >"to eliminate SASL".
| >
| >
| I've answered it several times.


No, you haven't.

| I will say AGAIN.

|...

Constant repetition of your feature request is not helpful. As hard
as this may be to believe, the fact that we (those of us who've
responded so far) don't support it doesn't mean we don't understand
it. On the contrary, the fact that you think you've been answering
the question means you haven't understood the question. Perhaps we
are wrong to assume you understand how your Dovecot installation is
configured.

I'll try one last time:

Your set of valid username+passwords are not hard-coded in Dovecot,
they are stored in some sort of external database. If exim can read
that database, there is no need for exim to be aware of Dovecot's
existence, let alone "talk to" it. Since exim already supports
nearly the same set of database access functions as Dovecot, if the
database is accessible to exim it is quite likely exim can use it
directly. It might not be accessible if, for example, Dovecot is
running on a different machine and the data is kept in a local file
rather than a remotely-queriable LDAP or SQL database.

So again, the question is simply this: is there any reason why exim
can't directly access the authentication data Dovecot is using?

If the answer is "no", please explain why you don't want to do it
that way. If the answer is "yes" or "I don't know", please provide
details on how the authentication data is currently made available to
Dovecot. We may be able to help you by explaining how to access it
via exim, or suggesting alternative methods that both exim and
Dovecot could utilize.

OTOH, if the answer is yet another repetition of "I currently do it
this way and I want to do be able to do it that way", ignoring the
question, don't bother. Let the thread die, it has accomplished its
purpose by now (communicating a feature request to Philip).

- Fred