Update: Multiple SMTP Accounts from the Console

This is a follow up for a previous post.

Before I committed myself to any particular MTA for the job, I continued the search for information. I stumbled across this HOWTO on Alpine Configuration which addressed my needs. It means things have changed a great deal from the old Pine application, more than I had realized. It means Alpine is designed to provide the full range of mail client functions, even if some of them are a little hard to find.

(Update: The HOWTO mentioned above has disappeared from the Net. I can only offer a quick-n-dirty version for those willing to edit their configuration file by hand: go here.)

Those instructions worked for my AT&T account, the biggest boondoggle of them all.

The only kicker was the need for repeatedly typing in the passwords for each account, once each session. I’m not interested in the security issues, since I allow no one to touch this laptop but me. Further, if other email clients can save and obscure passwords, how are they less vulnerable than Alpine? The answer was to recompile the version available for CentOS 5 from RPMForge. So I hunted down a mirror with the SRPM, and changed the SPEC file by adding one line:

--with-passfile=.alpine-passfile

just below the line which starts with ‘%configure \‘. Oh, and the rpmbuild -bb command failed to reveal I needed the tcl-devel package, and threw out an error because it couldn’t find tcl.h. Finally, to make sure this rebuilt version installed over the previous one as an upgrade, I changed the build number by making the line ‘Release: 1.rf‘ read ‘Release: 1.2.rf‘.

I ran ‘touch .alpine-passfile‘. Upon installing and running Alpine again, when I selected one of my roles for checking email, upon entering my password, it offered to save it for future use. That’s what I was looking for previously. Taking a quick look, it was indeed a hashed file.

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