How to make Pine not ask for a password - Pine

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:23:25 +0100, George wrote:

> I am using Pine to read my email from an IMAP server - when I
> start it up it will ask for username and password. I managed to
> get around the username request by including that in my INBOX
> path, but is there a way I could make Pine not ask for the
> password; could this process be automated?

First of all you need to check if your version of Pine is compiled
with support for password storage, PC-Pine has that compiled in, for
other OSs run 'pine -version' (I think that's right) and you should
get a list of the features available, if no line mentions 'password'
(or similar) as a possible parameter you're out of luck.

If you have support for password files, you need to create a file in
the folder Pine keeps it's pinerc file in, called 'pine.pwd'; if
this isn't there Pine won't store passwords. Of course when you
first create it, it will be empty. If all is well Pine asks for the
password once, then asks to store it for future use.

--
Chris Game

Life would be much easier if I had the source code.

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Chris Game wrote:

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:23:25 +0100, George wrote:

> I am using Pine to read my email from an IMAP server - when I start
> it up it will ask for username and password. I managed to get around
> the username request by including that in my INBOX path, but is there
> a way I could make Pine not ask for the password; could this process
> be automated?

If you have support for password files, you need to create a file in
the folder Pine keeps it's pinerc file in, called 'pine.pwd'; if this
isn't there Pine won't store passwords. Of course when you first create
it, it will be empty. If all is well Pine asks for the password once,
then asks to store it for future use.

A few corrections and additions.

* In PC-Pine the information above it correct, but it might not be in
any other version of Pine.

* If pine has password file support, then "pine -h" lists passfile as an
option. In that case, you can start Pine with the command

pine -passfile /path/to/passwordfile

which will make Pine use the file "passwordfile" as its password file. The
first time that this done, the file "passwordfile" must be created as an
empty file (e.g. with the command "touch /path/to/passwordfile"). Anyone
with access to the password file can access your account or if they are
smart enough decrypt it, so don't use it in systems you do not trust.

--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/alpine/