Subject: mail station useability - IMAP and AUTH smtp

From: "lavaklaublauer" <daviduchovny@...>
Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 23:38:41 -0000

Hello, group, this is my first post here, as I recently got a blue
det2 MS120 with 4.04e, which I was able to update the dialup and email
acccount into on thanks to users posts, not just here.  At any rate,
the useability of this machine is greatly reduced by the limitation of
pop3 and non auth smtp mailing.  I, for one, would love to see the
firmware updated to include these options, opening up other email
services such as those from the likes of AOL itself.  (for my
grandmother)
  The imap would not have to be complex, but just retrieve email form
one folder, the 'inbox', thus simplifying the programming.  Also,
'auth' could not be that hard?  
  For those of you asking the question 'how can we set up an auth smtp
relay without being taken advantage of spammers - here is how my
school does it:  They keep a record of recent (authenticated) pop3
logins and IPs, and only allow smtp mail from those.  Mial programs
usually check pop incoming mail first, and then the server would know
that it's OK to accept smtp session from that IP.  Jut a thought if
you're serious about setting up a server for users of the mailstation.
  Thanks to all for your great work on this unit, although from what I
see there is only a very basic debug shell and rom dump written in
assembly so far.  Where are all the z80 games that run on the ti-85
calculators? (that also use a z80 and pixel screen)  aah well.
  If we could just get smtp auth and simple imap protocol in these
units it would be fantastic.  Best of luck, and let me know if you do
so
 Andrew

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From: "John R. Hogerhuis" <jhoger@...>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 10:29:54 -0700

Do you think it would work just to set up a proxy server somewhere on
the Internet? There was a discussion about this, and the idea was that
you can use any ISP you like, we just need a proxy server somewhere that
doesn't demand SMTP auth.

I guess your POP3-auth-first would work.

Why do we we need IMAP instead of POP3? Anyway if we're proxying it
anyway the IMAP could be supported on the other side of the proxy.

-- John.

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From: "kat_skan" <kat_skan@...>
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 20:19:26 -0000

--- In [email-masked], "John R. Hogerhuis" <jhoger@p...>
> anyway the IMAP could be supported on the other side of the proxy.

Well, IMAP can do a few things server-side that seem like they'd be
pretty painful on an appliance like the Mailstation. Plus you could
handle considerably more messages if you kept everything server-side
and just cached a handfull of them locally.

That said, I rather doubt the existing firmware is extensible enough
that you can add support for arbitrary protocols to it. There has been
some discussion of porting CP/M to the Mailstation, though. Are there
any IMAP-capable email clients for that?

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From: "lavaklaublauer" <daviduchovny@...>
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 23:30:21 -0000

OK, so the goal was to allow my grandparents to use their mailstation
120 at their vacation cottage to send and receive email using their
pre-existing AOL account, with no extra charge.

It has been accomplished.

  What I did was allowed them to use a dial-up account that came with
my DSL (so it was free)  and using my DSL I set up a server that
receives their pop and smtp requests, translates pop to imap, adds an
AUTH wrapper to their smtp request, and re-routes them to and from AOL.  

  It wasn't the simplest of things, but it was a fun challenge.  The
smtp translator was locked down to only allow requests from their
dialup IP range, and email will only be sent if it matches their user
account, so the likelihood of becoming an open relay is practically nil.

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From: "John R. Hogerhuis" <jhoger@...>
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 07:59:56 -0700

> account, so the likelihood of becoming an open relay is practically

Cool!

Are you planning to make the script code available? Maybe there's a way
to make it more generic so that one or a few of us could setup proxy
servers for other users to connect to (without creating an open relay).

-- John.

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From: "lavaklaublauer" <daviduchovny@...>
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:59:36 -0000

well, the first sending software I could find is smtp server pro. This
is not complex enough to send emails to different smtp servers based
on sender's address.  However, the mdaemon sales rep said that mdaemon
pro would be capable of doing this, so if you want to set up a group
server, that might be your best bet.  For the pop software, I modified
this:
http://www.kohsuke.org/imap2pop/
because this is open source, it could easily be modified to accept
multiple users.  Note, however, that you have to change its method of
getting the imap server address, because the mailstation uses the
BEGINNING of the from address for pop authentication, and for most
servers the from: address must match the smtp login name.