Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 72941
imap_open fails with pmdf V6.1 mail servers
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:46:09 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020606 Description of problem: since the update to php-4.1.2-7.2.3/4 imap_open() fails with mail servers running pmdf V6.1 software (OpenVWM). No errors on the php-side and on the pmdf side only a "LOGIN-E-SYSTEM-LOGIN-bad-auth ..." is logged. It seems a problem of authentication method. Other mail server seem not affected. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. imap_open() to a server running pmdf V6.1 (Example mail server of University of Basel, Switzerland) 2. downgrade to php 4.0.6 --> it works 3. update back to php 4.1.2 --> fails Actual Results: nothing, just a warning with no errors in imap_errors(), imap_alerts() Expected Results: either success or an error message, but not just nothing. Additional info:
See second comment in #65190 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 65190 ***
OK, found the bug. it is not a duplicate of 65190, however. The problem is that imap_open() uses now cram-md5 as default. If now the mail server only accepts plain authentication, php-imap and mailserver to not communicate and simply drop out. There is one workaround which is to recompile php-imap without cram-md5 support. To do this, edit the file ext/imap/php_imap.c. Comment out the line auth_link( &cram... ); then rebuild the rpm and than you can use imap_open() with plain authentication again!
Does the server advertise CRAM-MD5 as an available authentication method? (To check with a POP server, telnet to the server's port (110) and issue the "CAPA" and "QUIT" commands and scan the results for "AUTH=CRAM-MD5", to check with an IMAP server, telnet to the port (143) and issue "A CAPABILITY", then "B LOGOUT".) The imap client code unconditionally uses CRAM-MD5 if the server advertises that it's capable of using CRAM-MD5 (per md5.txt from the imap-devel documentation), and disabling it for the world at large would undoubtedly leave certain users unable to connect to their servers.