problems with passwords containing characters with UTF-8 / ASCII codes >= 127

problems with passwords containing characters with UTF-8 / ASCII codes >= 127

[Jason Vas Dias]

Today I wasted alot of time after being forced to change my password,
which is used for
 the IMAP email server I use GNUS to connect to ;  after the password
change, and
updating the password correctly in ~/.authinfo ,  GNUS was unable to
login with the
error 'NO LOGIN failed.'  - attempts to turn on IMAP logging with :
(setq gnus-select-method
      '(nnimap "outlook.office365.com"
        (nnimap-record-commands t)
       )
)
just resulted in the message '(inhibited)' being written to the '*imap
log*' buffer .

Unfortunately,  it appears that password restrictrions meaning I had to choose
two 'special' characters resulted in me choosing the £ \uA3 :
'£' character
(decimal ASCII value 163).

Changing the password to remove the \xA3 character from it fixed the problem .

But I'd have no way of knowing that was the problem from anything
written by GNUS .

Some logs of IMAP commands of the server might have helped detect the problem ;
anyway something more than '(inhibited)'  or 'NO LOGIN failed.'  !
What does 'NO LOGIN failed.' refer to anyway ?

It is still unclear whether the '£' char in the password was causing
GNUS a problem
or whether it was causing the MS-Exchange server a problem.  Unfortunately, the
password restriction guidelines are not more clear about what
'special' characters
are accepted.

Is there anyway to get gnus to be more verbose about the SSL encrypted
command / response traffic it is having with the server and precisely
why it fails ?

Maybe I should look at patching it to be more verbose when an IMAP error occurs.

Thanks & Regards,
Jason

Re: problems with passwords containing characters with UTF-8 / ASCII codes >= 127

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 16 Nov 2015 16:17:02 +0000 Jason Vas Dias <jason.vas.dias@gmail.com> wrote: 

JVD> Today I wasted alot of time after being forced to change my password,
...
JVD> just resulted in the message '(inhibited)' being written to the '*imap
JVD> log*' buffer .

JVD> Is there anyway to get gnus to be more verbose about the SSL encrypted
JVD> command / response traffic it is having with the server and precisely
JVD> why it fails ?

JVD> Maybe I should look at patching it to be more verbose when an IMAP error occurs.

That might be a good idea, but be careful about leaking the password to
a general buffer like *Messages*.  It's OK for a quick run, but you
don't want to do it all the time.

In your case, `auth-source-debug' set to 'trivia or t or a custom
function might have helped.

Ted