Re: ideas needed for nnmail-pop3-movemail

[Christian Limpach <Christian.Limpach@Nice.CH>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

> Well, if iteration is handled by nnmail through an alist of mailboxes, then
> nnmail properly should also maintain cache of passwords, either in the same
> alist or a parallel alist, assuming that password caching is enabled (which
> by default it should not).  Within the let form that temporarilly binds
> pop3-maildrop and pop3-mailhost, pop3-password is bound to the cached
> password for the mailhost/maildrop or nil.  Then pop3-movemail is called
> within that let form, and everything just works.

If it is so, then the code which asks for passwords should be removed
from pop3 altogether.  Otherwise there will be two routines which
query for pop3 passwords and this is bad: if the user doesn't enter a
password at the first query (like to skip that pop server) pop3.el
will ask again (current API: no password = ask, right ?).

Also nnmail will not know wheter to save the password or not, as
pop3.el doesn't report why it failed.  Another advantage of pop3.el
handling the password caching is that there could be multiple clients
(gnus, vm) and the user would still only have to enter the password
once.  And finally I prefer to trust pop3.el with my password (after I
have seen the code) than some client.

If you look at my code, you will see, that I have indeed used a let
form to bind all the pop3 variables.  I had first added the parsing of
the pop-server specification to pop3.el, but then I decided that it
would be better to make as few changes to pop3.el as possible.  The
result was that I could move everything out of pop3.el except for
password caching.

What I don't like about my implementation is that it doesn't allow a
single host to be used several times with different
users/ports/... but this can be changed easily by extending the key
used to lookup the password in the alist.

    christian