Comment 22 for bug 24220

Created attachment 269387
non-bit-rotted patch

Christian, I've applied your patch, un-bit-rotted it, and tweaked the error strings a bit. One question - Is my understanding of this patch correct? It makes SMTP compatible with IMAP/POP3 - we'll only try secure auth if the user has chosen it explicitly, and the pref defaults to false. But before this patch, we would try secure auth always (unless the user explicitly set a hidden pref not to) and then fall back to insecure auth. So for some existing users, on upgrade, we will silently switch to insecure auth? That seems bad.

If all that's correct, what do you think about something like this: try using secure auth once, if available. If that works, automatically set the pref to use secure auth; if it doesn't work, don't put up an error message on the failure, and set a pref not to try this again for this server. Possibly, you could use the existing try secure auth pref for this purpose.

We really want to go to a place where, on new server/account setup, we automatically try to figure out the most secure settings (TLS/SSL, etc) and secure auth automatically, and allow the user to change them later. This would b e a step in that direction.