GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 708627
Use PLAIN instead of LOGIN for GOA SMTP accounts
Last modified: 2013-10-05 14:42:03 UTC
I configured my email account in GNOME Online Accounts, Evolution picked up the account, and fetches emails over IMAP. So that part works. However, if I try sending an email, Evolution says an error occured: The reported error was "SMTP server mail.toniob.net does not support LOGIN authentication". What happens here is that my email provider only supports the PLAIN authentication method for SMTP, but Evolution tries to use the LOGIN method. My email provider tried enabling the LOGIN method as well, and sure enough, Evolution could send emails. I'm running Fedora 20: gnome-online-accounts-3.9.92-1.fc20.x86_64 evolution-3.9.92-1.fc20.x86_64 The bug could be in Evolution rather than GNOME Online Accounts, but not being sure, I decided to open it here.
I can reproduce with my personal mail server. I can add my account via GOA, but when I try to send an email Evolution complains. I have not sent emails from this setup recently (sending mails from my personal account added via GOA with Evolution), but I think this used to work before. In any case, GOA doesn't advertise the authentication mechanisms and Evolution should be able to guess it from the server's greeting. In my case it looks like this: 220 arati.lostca.se ESMTP Postfix EHLO lostca.se 250-arati.lostca.se 250-PIPELINING 250-SIZE 26214400 250-VRFY 250-ETRN 250-AUTH PLAIN 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES 250-8BITMIME 250 DSN
Just confirmed that it works on F19 with: evolution-3.8.3-2.fc19 evolution-data-server-3.8.3-1.fc19 gnome-online-accounts-3.8.2-1.fc19 So this looks like a regression in evolution. Reassigning.
I changed the default authentication method to PLAIN. This carries some new requirements, however: 1) All SMTP servers configured through GOA support the SMTP Service Extensions framework (RFC 1869), which defines the "EHLO" command. 2) All SMTP servers configured through GOA support the authentication service extension (RFC 4954), which defines the "AUTH" command. But these SMTP extensions have been around for ages and are commonplace, so it shouldn't exclude very many users. We could say if you need to talk to a bare bones SMTP server that only supports "HELO" and "LOGIN" then you have to configure the account directly in Evolution. Fixed for E-D-S 3.11.1 and 3.10.1: https://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution-data-server/commit/?id=44160d305887efb133bfd77d3d87102c4a1bf7e1 https://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution-data-server/commit/?h=gnome-3-10&id=6ccfc7ef658779a61f82b819d81fd43f667a5cca