This Space for Rent

New Code!

This was the weekend for updating postoffice; after rolling the code up to 1.1.11 on friday, I spent the weekend discovering that the whole world is not actually a VAX, and as part of the big effort to make the code bugfree and more portable, I took a slight detour back to some of the old never-finished smtp authentication code, and implemented AUTH LOGIN for people in virtual domains, so they can use the same login and password they use for their vm-pop3d sessions to relay mail messages out to the rest of the world. This is a big enough feature to require a major version# bump, thus the new release is version 1.2.0.

AUTH LOGIN has the potential of being a huge honking security bug, of course, so it's currently only enabled if you configure postoffice with --with-auth; a polite thing to do would be to add STARTTLS to the smtp daemon, then allow people who aren't in a virtual domain to log in and relay mail, but politeness needs to wait until the existing code has been put in for long enough to be throughly tested against security and coding holes.

Once again, thanks to Pierre-Philipp Braun, of nethence, for giving me extensive feedback and root access to his systems over the past few days; without actually having access to a non-ia32 machine, it would have been much more difficult to actually find some of the cases where the world is not really a VAX.