Re: multiple Gmail accounts + nnimap + ~/.authinfo

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to gnu.emacs.gnus as well.

On Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:30:44 +0200 Suno Ano <suno.ano@googlemail.com> wrote: 

>> | On Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:31:30 -0500,
>> | Ted Zlatanov
>> | from the organization of Теодор Златанов @ Cienfuegos
>> | who can be reached at: tzz@lifelogs.com
>> | (whose comments are cited below with " Ted> "),
>> | had this to say in article <86hceb6ikt.fsf@lifelogs.com>
>> | in newsgroups gmane.emacs.gnus.user
>> | concerning the subject of Re: multiple Gmail accounts + nnimap + ~/.authinfo
>> | (see <mailman.10199.1207755910.18990.info-gnus-english@gnu.org> for more details)

Ted> ...Assuming your method is called "gmail1"?
SA> well, it's called "<gmail_1>@gmail.com" but then that should not make a
SA> difference to calling it just "gmail1" -  yes?

Right, it was just for the example.

Ted> We could also make 'machine' a more complex field, but I don't
Ted> like that approach.
SA> Why is it you do not like it?

It's harder to parse and write.  I usually try to keep files like
~/.authinfo free of Gnus-specific extensions because other systems may
break when they parse it.

Another approach is to have a specific authinfo file for each server.  I
don't like that approach much.

Ted> Any opinions?
SA> Well, before I used nnimap I used nnml as back end. With this back end
SA> and the following snippet it worked like charm. Maybe we could try it
SA> this way for nnimap too? What do others think about it?

SA> (add-to-list 'mail-sources `(imap :server    ,priv-imap-gmail-mail-server
SA>                                   :user      ,priv-gmail1-mail-user
SA>                                   :password  ,priv-imap-gmail1-password
SA>                                   :port 993
SA>                                   :stream ssl
SA>                                   :authentication login
SA>                             )
SA> )

mail-source.el and nnimap.el get authentication info in very different
ways currently.  In fact I'm in the process of writing auth-source.el
(it's about 50% finished now) which will unite mail-source.el,
nnimap.el, SMTP, and all the other Gnus authentication hooks into one
sensible structure.  You can look at the auth-source.el code to see what I
mean.  Currently it doesn't support multiple accounts per server, so
it's good you brought up that use case.  I've added the necessary code
to auth-source.el, and will add server support to netrc.el when
we agree on how that should look in ~/.authinfo..

Ted