MIT network question: desktop linux, day three

[Chris Devers]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Dan Barrett wrote:

> Does MIT's SMTP server (outgoing.mit.edu) require authentication?

Quite by coincidence, I've been playing with SquirrelMail, and its config
tool allows you, among other things, to profile your outgoing mail server.

For example, here's what I get when testing outgoing.mit.edu:

    [snip]

    If you have already set the hostname and port number, I can try to
    automatically detect the mechanisms your SMTP server supports.
    Auto-detection is *optional* - you can safely say "n" here.

    Try to detect auth mechanisms? [y/N]: y
    Trying to detect supported methods (SMTP)...
    Testing none:           NOT SUPPORTED
    Testing login:          SUPPORTED
    Testing CRAM-MD5:       SUPPORTED
    Testing DIGEST-MD5:     SUPPORTED

    What authentication mechanism do you want to use for SMTP connections?
    none - Your SMTP server does not require authorization.
    login - Plaintext. If you can do better, you probably should.
    cram-md5 - Slightly better than plaintext.
    digest-md5 - Privacy protection - better than cram-md5.

    [snip]

So there you go. I'm not on MIT's network, so it's conceivable that you'll
get different results if you're on that network. It may be overkill, but
you may want to download a copy of SquirrelMail and play with it's conf.pl
script just to see if it helps as a diagnostic tool (or if the source code
for it points you in useful directions).


-- 
Chris Devers