Re: future wishes - ACAP and LDAP support

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> 1) A greater flexibility in specifying how mail is to be fetched.  For
> instance, you may have several POP maildrops with different user names
> and passwords, as well and local mail spools, MAPI servers, Qmail
> spools and other animals.  We need a way to specify this.

This is quite easy.  For instance, you can use VM's model for POP
specification:

    A POP maildrop specification has the following format:

       \"HOST:PORT:AUTH:USER:PASSWORD\"

    HOST is the host name of the POP server
    PORT is the TCP port number to connect to (should normally be 110).
    USER is the user name sent to the server.
    PASSWORD is the secret shared by you and the server for
    authentication purposes.  How is it used depends on the value of
    the AUTH parameter.  If the PASSWORD is \"*\", VM will prompt
    you for the password the first time you try to retrieve mail from
    maildrop.  If the password is valid, VM will not ask you for the
    password again during this Emacs session.

    AUTH is the authentication method used to convince the server you
    should have access to the maildrop.  Acceptable values are
    \"pass\", \"rpop\" and \"apop\".  For \"pass\", the PASSWORD is sent to
    the server with the POP PASS command.  For \"rpop\", the PASSWORD
    should be the string to be sent to the server via the RPOP
    command.  In this case the string is not really a secret;
    authentication is done by other means.  For \"apop\", an MD5 digest
    of the PASSWORD appended to the server timestamp will be sent to
    the server with the APOP command.  In order to use \"apop\" you
    will have to set the value of vm-pop-md5-program appropriately to
    point at the program that will generate the MD5 digest that VM
    needs.


Alternatively, we could make `nnmail-spool-file' be more than just a
list of strings, for instance:

(setq nnmail-spool-file '("/var/mail/hniksic"
                          (pop :host "regoc" :user "hniksic" :password "uhoh")
                          (mapi :host "fubar")
                          ...))

It would be backward-compatible, and straightforward to implement.
More or less, anyway.

Also, it should be renamed to something nicer, like
`nnmail-spool-methods', the old variable being just a varalias.

-- 
Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia
--------------------------------+--------------------------------
* Q: What is an experienced Emacs user?
* A: A person who wishes that the terminal had pedals.