🚀 go-pugleaf

>>> On Mon, 20 Sep 1993 14:03:32 -0400, kyle@crystal.WonderWorks.com
>>> (Kyle Jones) said:

Kyle> [ ... ]

Well, well, here is the man. While you are on these screens, may I
suggest adding a little feature, your know, just a little warm and nice
feature.

It had escaped my notice that the GNU Emacs 19 movemail does have POP-3
support built in, but quite nastily it requires to be installed setuid
root, which is a no-no-no-no.

It is easy to change it to not run setuid root and instead ask a
password to pass on to the POP3 server; passing the password as a
parameter on the command line of movemail is a tad insecure, so the best
bet is to feed it via stdin.

Now the little feature is as follows: *if* the folder name begins with
one of 'po:', 'pop2:', 'pop3:', 'imap:', 'imap2:' (either hardcoded or
contained in a suitable list or regexp, say vm-via-server-regexp), pass
it on as an argument to movemail, but _also_ ask the user for a password
and feed it to the movemail process via stdin (expand-file-name should
also be avoided for the source in this case...).

I can do this myself, as the relevant function to modify is just

    (defun vm-move-mail (source destination)
      (let ((status
	     (call-process vm-movemail-program nil nil nil
			   (expand-file-name source)
			   (expand-file-name destination))))
	(if (not (= 0 status))
	    (error "vm: %s exited with code %s" vm-movemail-program status))
	status))

but if it is done "officially" it's better. Doing it to rmail would also
help perhaps, but I don't use rmail (ack! babyl! phffft!).

I am indeed considering finding the time to add imap support (via
cclient) to movemail, not just pop (also an append mode -- this would
allow people to use movemail before *any* mailer, as in

	: ${MAILER=mush}
	: ${INBOX=$HOME/.mailbox}
	: ${MAILPROTO=pop3}

	movemail -a $MAILPROTO:$USER $INBOX && $MAILER -f $INBOX

Nice, eh? (thanks to somebody on the net for inspiring this).