Re: Committing new smtpmail.el later tonight

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:43:48 +0200 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote: 

LMI> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>> But maybe the above will work?  It seems to me it would work for
>> `nnimap-credentials' as well, which perhaps argues that it should be
>> in the auth-source API.

LMI> It's possible.  The SMTP situation is slightly special, though.  For
LMI> IMAP, we know that we want credentials.  For SMTP, we don't know, so we
LMI> first see if there are any there, and only if there are, we want to
LMI> :create the possibly missing `secret'.

LMI> I think doing that special-casing in smtpmail.el instead of trying to
LMI> shove it down into the auth-source functions is slightly cleaner.
LMI> Unless some new protocols appear that have the same requirements as
LMI> SMTP.

OK.  So really the case is "possibly anonymous" versus "definitely
authenticated" services.  NNTP is also like that and IMAP itself can
function unauthenticated if so configured.  IRC can be used anonymously
or not.  So maybe `auth-source-search' should be smart enough to
accomodate the two cases through a common API.

Ted