On 1/31/2012 1:44 AM, James Day wrote: > > The only question that remains for me is, what is the difference between > PLAIN and LOGIN mechanisms? I understand from > http://wiki.dovecot.org/Authentication/Mechanisms that they are both plain > text. Unfortunately google searches for login authentication aren't > particularly helpful.
The way the username and password are encoded and sent on the wire is slightly different. Biggest visible difference is PLAIN sends the username and password together in the same command; LOGIN sends them separately. Some clients only support one of these methods. Broadly speaking, some Microsoft clients only support LOGIN, some third-party clients only support PLAIN. There's no reason to not offer both. -- Noel Jones
