Re: How to auto connect via SSH and Balsa?

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On 2001.09.15 08:29:48 +0100 Bojan Land wrote:
> I can get SSH to forward a port and get my mail that way through Balsa. 
> But I can do this only if I manually forward the port.  I don't wish to
> have it permenantly forwarded, so I'm wondering if Balsa has a preconnect
> functionatlity?

Tunnelling is a really bad idea - this has been discussed on the list before.
Balsa provides SSL/TLS functionality - use that.  Its much more secure than
SSH v1.  SSH v2 is better, but tunnelling is still a bad idea.  It is questionable
whether tunnelling provides real security anyway. 

>  I use fetchmail to pull all pop3 mail, figuring Balsa is
> used for reading/writing mail.

True but balsa is a networked applictaion and uses the mail related network
protocols to do its work.

>  But IMAP I must do through Balsa itself,

IMAP is an access protocol for remote mailboxes.  It would be impossible to
implement IMAP by any other means than to provide the UA with an IMAP client.

> and I don't see a place where to put a "command to run to establish a
> connection"... ?  Any clues?

IMAP uses TLS/SSL to secure a connection.  This is the correct way to do this
and is described in the STARTTLS extension to IMAP (RFC 2595).

Simply because other mail UAs are badly designed and require an external
tunnelling program to provide security doesn't mean that balsa should implement
these design errors as well.  The use of tunnelling is an ad-hoc solution and
is always the wrong way to implement security when a protocol is provided with
a standardised peer reviewed method such as the IMAP STARTTLS command.

Brian Stafford