[lug] trouble posting to mailing list(s)

Wayde Allen wallen at boulder.nist.gov
Fri May 19 09:03:14 MDT 2000


On Thu, 18 May 2000, D. Stimits wrote:

> Apparently my isp rejects pop3 requests without some sort of user ID.
> Even in Netscape, I have to tell it what my password is (but it
> memorizes it if wanted), as a preference.
> 
> The ppp connection does its own pap authentication, for dialup, but is
> insufficient to get access to the email. Pine has a menu item "Change
> Password", which seems to be a frontend to the unix passwd command.
> Because I have to get my email from multiple machines, I don't download
> mail to my local one. What I did want was a text-based mail reader that
> could read my ISP without deleting everything on the server as it
> downloads...pine just happens to be the one I considered.

You misunderstood me, and/or I didn't communicate well here.  I never said
that POP didn't need a username and password for authentication.  Indeed
you do need to provide this information to connect to a POP server.  What
I wasn't sure about was whether or not Pine could be used to gather mail
via POP directly.  Evidently it can. 

I personally have never used Pine that way.  I have only used it as a mail
client and relied on other software to handle the mail transport. For
instance, on my home machine I use fetchmail to POP mail off of my wife's
ISP.  This can be configured to leave the mail on your ISP as you say you
want to do.  I also seem to remember that it can POP mail from multiple
sites.  In this case, the Fetchmail software handles the username/password
authentication with the POP server, gets the mail, and injects it into
your local mail system.  You can then use whatever mail client you want to
read the mail.  In this scenario Pine doesn't have to do any user
authentication with the server.

My apologies for the confusion.

- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)






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