Bug 52572

Summary: PREAUTH authentication for IMAP
Product: [Frameworks and Libraries] kio Reporter: Carsten Burghardt <burghardt>
Component: imapAssignee: kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED    
Severity: wishlist CC: dwmw2
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Debian testing   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Attachments: Potential solution

Description Adam Brewster 2003-01-03 22:10:45 UTC 
Version:           1.4.3 (using KDE KDE 3.0.5)
Installed from:    Debian testing/unstable Packages
OS:          Linux

Demand for this feature may be less than widespread, but it would be nice if KMail supported IMAP's PREAUTH function. I see two ways which this could be done.

The easiest would be to add another button to the Authentication Method section of the Modify Account Dialog that skips the authentication phase of the IMAP session all together.  Anybody using a preauthenticated sesion will probably know what to do here.

The nicest way would be to check if the connection is preauthenticated before issuing an authenticate command in each of the existing authentication modes (Clear Text, PLAIN, LOGIN ...).  In this case no user intervention would be required.

Adding this feature would allow mail to be transfered through a secure channel (ssh) for users whose ISPs do not support SSL or TLS.  It would also allow ssh style public key authentication, or even rsh host based authentication to be used for an IMAP session.

Thank you, and I'm sorry if this feature already exists,
Adam Brewster
Comment 1 Adam Brewster 2003-01-06 04:28:01 UTC 
Created attachment 702 [details]
Potential solution

I added one line to the kdebase/kioslave/imap4/imap4.cc file to recheck the
connection state after the greeint has been processed to capture
pre-authenticated connections.

This is my first attempt to contribute to this project.  If I did something
wrong, please let me know.
Comment 2 George Staikos 2003-09-29 10:09:17 UTC 
Any opinion on this patch guys?  This person filed the report along with a 
patch over 8 months ago.
Comment 3 Stephan Kulow 2004-05-29 16:34:12 UTC 
Replaced kde@adambrewster.mailshell.com with burghardt@kde.org due to bounces by reporter
Comment 4 Thomas McGuire 2007-12-12 23:37:49 UTC 
Reassigning the bugs of the SMTP, IMAP and POP ioslaves to kdepim-bugs.
Comment 5 David Woodhouse 2013-02-11 22:38:17 UTC 
As a sysadmin who prefers to give users only SSH key access and not password access by default, I was surprised when a new user just complained that kmail doesn't support preauth and accessing the mailserver by 'ssh $mailserver exec /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap' like most other mailers can. It would be very good to get this fixed...
Comment 6 Christophe Marin 2018-11-17 12:45:09 UTC 
kio_imap4 doesn't exist anymore.