[GTALUG] Fetchmail and Office365 and backslashes, oh my!

[Peter King]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2018 at 03:08:03PM -0400, Myles Braithwaite 👾 via talk wrote:
 
> I was having the same issues a year ago and basically gave up. I'm not 
> 100% sure if this will work for you but it magically started working for me.
> 
> I switched my O365 account two-factor auth (they use SMS to transmit the 
> code, Ew) and had to create a bunch of app passwords[0] to be able to 
> connect with my main email client. Randomly one day decided to see if 
> this would work with fetchmail and lo and behold it did.
> 
> I don't know why it worked or if something was disabled in that year but 
> it works now.
> 
> [0]: The location where you generate new passwords is here: 
> <https://account.activedirectory.windowsazure.com/AppPasswords.aspx>

Thanks for the suggestion!  Unfortunately, it didn't work.

I tried representing the backslash in .fetchmailrc as "\92" which is the 
decimal escape ASCII code for the backslash.  It failed, but, oddly, the
logfile has the MS Office365 server reading the username with a double
backslash.  No idea why.  (The same results with octal and hex codes for
the backslash.)

If you put in a single backslash, it vanishes.

A double backslash remains a double backslash.

A triple backslash becomes a double backslash.

Quadruple remains quadruple.  Quintuple becomes quadruple.  And so on.

Either fetchmail or Office365 (or both together) are doing something to
that backslash that seems to be causing the problem.  I can't figure out
what, though.   Arrgghh.  I use Linux to avoid this sort of idiotic issue,
not to have to batter through it.

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king at utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		   (416)-978-3311 dept
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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