[exim] Multiple SMTP authenticators for the same mechanism?

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Author: Chris Siebenmann
Date:  
To: exim-users
CC: cks
Subject: [exim] Multiple SMTP authenticators for the same mechanism?
We have a piece of software that we want to run that can only send
useful email through an authenticated SMTP connection, using a fixed
login and fixed authentication information that you configure into it.
Our normal SMTP authentication is against our Unix logins and their
passwords using the Dovecot authentication driver. For obvious reasons,
we would like to avoid having this software authenticate through an
actual Unix login; instead we would like to give it a fake login with
a password that can only be used for SMTP authentication (and then only
from the one host that this software will run on).

All of this leads me to ask: is it possible to have multiple SMTP
authenticators configured for the same mechanism (the 'public_name')?
The documentation on server_condition suggests that it's not, in that
there's no documented 'skip this driver' return value.

Beyond that, is it even valid to have two authentication drivers with
the same public_name value, even if their server_advertise_condition
will only cause one to be available for any particular connection (say
if they are conditional based on the connecting ip)?

Alternately, can people think of another clever way to solve this
particular issue?

(One potential option is to find a SMTP authentication mechanism that
this software supports and we don't currently use, then set up a driver
for it just for this host with hard-coded stuff. But at this point I'm
not sure what authenticators the software supports, so I'm proceeding
on the conservative assumption that it supports only PLAIN and LOGIN,
both of which we already have general drivers for.)

    - cks