[Dovecot] Password authentication and character set

[Geert Hendrickx]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:00:00PM +0200, Fredrik Grönqvist wrote:
> Yes, I see. So in light of this and the conversation on the imap-protocol
> -list
> 
> http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/imap-protocol/2008-February/000822.html 
> 
> 
> our current options seem to boil down to having the passwords ISO-8859-1 
> encoded (given the demographics of our users).
> Those using operating systems with native UTF-8 clients have to use 
> passwords containing only 7-bit characters.


Actually I would do it the other way around.  You can't really explain to
your UTF-8 using users "you should use that older client instead of this
newer one to make your login work".  And some day you'll have to switch to
UTF-8 anyway.


> I didn't realise the specifications were so flexible on this password
> issue.


s/flexible/vague/ :-)


The consensus on the imap-protocol list, and particularly the message you
refer to, seems to be "we should replace ASCII with UTF-8 in the spec".


	Geert