Re: smtpmail and ~/.authinfo

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2011 06:39:12 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > It turned out that ~/.authinfo _must_ have Unix EOLs, or else sending
> > mail with smtpmail not work.  This happens because auth-source-search
> > is called from smtpmail inside a form that let-binds
> > coding-system-for-read to `binary'.  That binding is there for reasons
> > that have nothing to do with auth-source-search, and a cursory search
> > finds no similar bindings in other users of auth-source-search.
> 
> Yes, that sounds like an accident.  Perhaps that let binding should be
> narrowed dramatically?

You should know: you put it there ;-)

The log message for revision 104742, where these bindings were
introduced, doesn't say much.  Can you tell why did you need them (for
Windows, no less)?

> > It should be easy to fix this, but I need to know what can be in Netrc
> > files to do this correctly.  Can these files include non-ASCII
> > characters, or do all fields in these files have to be strict 7-bit
> > ASCII?
> 
> There can basically be anything in the files, I think, and the encoding
> is local.  But it's unusual to put non-ASCII into the file for most
> protocols, since so many protocols developed their auth schemes before
> anybody had considered the problem of coding systems.
> 
> > Also, is there any need to do something special with non-ASCII
> > characters (if they are allowed) when communicating with the SMTP
> > server, like encode them in some particular way?
> 
> It...  varies.  :-)  SMTP allows using several AUTH methods, and I'm
> actually not sure whether any of them actually specify what charset to
> use.  DIGEST-MD5 does, I think?  But smtpmail.el doesn't support it,
> anyway.
> 
> I think AUTH PLAIN, for instance, is basically essentially a binary
> thing, where you're allowed to use any blob of bytes as user name and
> password.  Except NULs.

This tells me that TRT is to bind coding-system-for-read to raw-text
for auth-source-search to do its thing.  But I'm still uncertain what
should be the binding in the rest of smtpmail-via-smtp.