Re: multiple POP support for RMAIL

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com>]

          ...there is currently no way to specify multiple passwords
          non-interactively.

      Please implement this feature

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@glug.org> responded

   actually the code posted does indeed support this usage, ...

Thank you for explaining.  Unfortunately, I tried what I understood to
do and it fails.

I evaluated the following:

    (setq rmail-pop-password nil)
    (setq rmail-pop-password-required t)
    (setq rmail-primary-inbox-list '("po:AAA:foo.edu" 
                                     "po:AAA:bar.net"
                                     "po:BBB:bar.net"
                                     "po:CCC:bar.net"))
    (rmail-set-pop-password "XXX" "foo.edu")
    (rmail-set-pop-password "YYY" "bar.net")
    (rmail-set-pop-password "ZZZ" "bar.net")
    (rmail-set-pop-password "ZZZ" "bar.net")

and then tried to fetch email from my four different accounts.
Instead, I received this error message:

    Getting mail from post office ...
    movemail: Error connecting to POP server: 
        -ERR [AUTH] Password supplied for "bob" is incorrect.
    (No new mail has arrived)

Note that I have the same user name for two different accounts,

    AAA on foo.edu and AAA on bar.net

and the same password on BBB@bar.net and on CCC@bar.net

Thinking that the overlap caused trouble, I commented out

    ;;    (rmail-set-pop-password "YYY" "bar.net")
    ;;    (rmail-set-pop-password "ZZZ" "bar.net")

and reevaluated the other expressions and still received the same
message. (However, I did not set any values to nil first, but that
should not have mattered.)

Before I could fetch email from the one POP account, I had to do this,
including set the various values to nil first (which I find strange):

    (setq rmail-pop-password-required nil)
    (setq rmail-primary-inbox-list '(nil))
    (rmail-set-pop-password nil nil)

    (setq rmail-primary-inbox-list '("po:AAA:foo.edu" "/var/mail/AAA"))
    (setq rmail-pop-password-required t)
    (setq rmail-pop-password "XXX")
    (setq rmail-preserve-inbox nil)

(Normally, I set

 (setq rmail-preserve-inbox nil)

but this time I wanted to make sure I would not lose it.)

(Incidentally, I think the format for rmail-primary-inbox-list should
be

    [METHOD:][USER@](HOST|PATH|HOST/PATH)[:PASSWORD]

such as

    (setq rmail-primary-inbox-list 
     '("po:AAA@foo.edu:XXX" 
       "po:BBB@bar.net/weird/path/to/BBB:YYY"
       "/var/mail/AAA"))

where POP is the default method, the local account's USER is the
default user, localmachine is the default HOST, "/var/mail/USER" is
the default path, and the local account's PASSWORD is the default
password.  Following ttn's good suggestion, this expression could go
into a separate `chmod go-rwx' file to provide at least some security,
like a .netrc file.)

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         Rattlesnake Enterprises
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.teak.cc                             bob@rattlesnake.com