I've been trying to set up a TLS/AUTHenticated MTA-MTA connection for my company using qmail. The biggest problem was the AUTH part with the ISPs SMTP server, since it rejected my supplied credentials. After a lot of investigation I reached the conclusion that /usr/share/doc/qmail-1.03-r16/qmail-remote-auth-patch-doc.txt.gz was wrong (from mail-mta/qmail-1.03-r16 - the stable ebuild on x86) to instruct me to add the username/password base64-encoded, since they are re-encoded by qmail. This also raises the issue on how to transmit spaces as part of the username/password, since the parser in the patch tokenizes the string using ' ' as delimiter. I'd suggest leaving the original qmail-remote-auth patch (which uses the pre-encoded credentials) in order to have this possibility too. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install mail-mta/qmail-1.03-r16 2. Setup an non TLS connection through a TCP/IP tunnel (or cap with Ethereal) to a SMTP-AUTH supporting MTA in /var/qmail/control/smtproutes following the docs. 3. Send a mail and decode64 the auth credentials. Actual Results: I got the base64-encoded username/base64-encoded password as credentials. Expected Results: I got the nonencoded username/password as credentials to the remote server. Actually the patch supports AUTH-LOGIN, thus the credentials should be base64-encoded. Using the docs with the patched qmail produced credentials encoded two times. I'm not sure which is correct (should be encoded 2 times???) since I'm not a SMTP guru etc., so maybe the ISP's server I tested towards was poorly configured
NOT a Gentoo documentation issue.
This documentation is included from upstream, so please bug them. It's true that it's not base64 encoded.
(In reply to comment #2) > This documentation is included from upstream, so please bug them. It's true that > it's not base64 encoded. You mean that the original patch has poor documentation?
(In reply to comment #3) > You mean that the original patch has poor documentation? Yes, because Gentoo doesn't install special documentation of the patches but includes the ones provided by the patch author.
(In reply to comment #4) > (In reply to comment #3) > > You mean that the original patch has poor documentation? > > Yes, because Gentoo doesn't install special documentation of the patches but > includes the ones provided by the patch author. After further investigation, here's what I found: The docs are downloaded explicitly by the ebuild from http://www.soffian.org/downloads/qmail/qmail-remote-auth-patch-doc.txt, and the only web reference inside is the link to the patch itself. The doc is signed "j." (not helpful imho). The link http://tomclegg.net/qmail/#qmail-remote-auth tells of some modifications to the patch (made by "j"ay soffian, modified by tom clegg), and the new docs are consistent with the behavior of qmail-remote. I guess the ebuild author did not realize that the patch is not the original. Is there anything more I can do?
(In reply to comment #5) > Is there anything more I can do? Maybe to mail Tom Clegg about the problem of putting spaces in the username/password.
