Different passwords for OX and mail server

[jans]

Hello,

we are just setting up OX as a frontend for our existing Courier and Postfix servers.
As I understand, it´s currently not possible to have different passwords for OX, SMTP and IMAP (at least not for the primary mail account), which is really a problem for us. So we thought about modifying the authentication process for Courier and Postfix so that two passwords will be accepted (the existing one and the OX password).
I think that other users might have had this problem, too. So I wonder if someone has already solved it in a similar (or a completely different?) way...

Greetings,
Jan

[Martin Heiland]

Hi Jan,

what exactly is the problem with that handling? If you are worried about password synchronization between those services, you might use o-x-authentication-imap to use the IMAP Server as authentication backend for OX. Or o-x-authentication-ldap if IMAP and OX should use one central directory service. That way you don't need extra OX passwords but continue to use the IMAP credentials.

In the meantime, OX has an interface to encrypt 3rd-party services' passwords using the users password. But at the time the IMAP implementation was created, that was not possible so we had to use the same password otherwise it would have been stored plain-text.

Greetings

[jans]

Hi Martin,

the problem is, that the passwords are generated and saved once in Thunderbird. So normally our users don´t know their mail passwords (and they are not very mnemonic ). Furthermore the IMAP and SMTP passwords are different. So we would have to change them all and tell the users to enter them in Thunderbird, which we must continue to use parallel to OX.

Does your second statement mean, that it's now possible to have different passwords? Or will that be a feature of coming releases?

[Martin Heiland]

The second statement means that it would be technically possible but is not on a roadmap since it has not been requested as a feature. You might contact our sales people if you're interested in requesting this personal enhancement for your environment. Or send patches

Greetings

[jans]

In case someone´s interested: We finally solved the problem using "authpipe" and a self written Perl script as authentication method for IMAP. The script recognizes whether the request comes from OX or some other client (e.g. Thunderbird) and looks into our LDAP directory (where every user has two entries) for the appropriate password.

Greetings,
Jan

[jans]

You can´t configure different passwords for OX and your primary mail account inside OX. So we told out IMAP server to accept two passwords per user: His own and OX´s password.