On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Frank DeChellis wrote:

> We're using Exim 4.44 and are ready to implement SMTP authentication.

I'm speaking for our departmental/faculty mail in this regard (not the 
central mail system).  You'd need to translate this into your own 
situation somehow.

At the present time, we require *remote* users to authenticate 
themselves via secure route (587, or 465 for the Billware weenies).  
Any of our users attempting to submit from elsewhere to our mailer via 
port 25 would be treated like any other remote MTA i.e would most 
likely be blocked on the basis of an anti-spam blacklisting.

Authentication is not currently required for users who are on campus 
(determined by their source IP, basically). 

> Before we do, did any of you run into mail clients that DO NOT 
> support SMTP authentication?  What was tyour solution around that?

Since the remote authenticated submission was an additional service, 
rather than substituting for anything that was there before, we didn't 
have much difficulty with it.  If/when we start demanding 
authentication for on-campus submission I'd expect there to be more 
problems, but chiefly because our kind of user will *insist* on "doing 
their own thing" rather than taking the standard offering, but aren't 
really capable of following the instructions they are given.  Then 
they complain to their friends "it does not work", which libel 
occasionally reaches us, but they refuse to reveal what they're trying 
and what symptoms they're getting.  Frustrating, really.

Mind you, the criticism of "doing our own thing" could be levelled at 
us too, though I try my best to fight against it - I usually get 
overruled by manglement...

Solutions that we'd be likely to offer to a user in that position 
would be, I think, in no particular order:

* use an ssh client to log in to something you have access to on 
campus, and run a mail client there.  

* use the campus VPN (so you appear to be on-campus anyway, no matter 
where you are) 

* if all else fails, use our web/mail interface (which at the moment 
is squirrelmail).  But this, being stateless, results in much greater 
load on our servers, so we try to discourage it except as a last 
resort.

At one time we might have recommended ssh tunnelling, which certainly 
works when it's set up properly: but explaining to users how to set it 
up and use it proved to be so complicated and result in so much 
support effort that we abandoned it as a solution.

hope this is useful

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