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

[David Collier-Brown]

In a previous life, I worked with one of the people MS hired to do the 
ergonomics of Windows 95.

Their task was to provide a lovely user interface that was *as different 
as possible* from any of Xerox Star, Apple Mac or Unix X11, specifically 
so that people would find them frustrating if they had ever used Windows.

Regrettably, that meant that Windows was frustrating to anyone who had 
ever used a computer.

Net result: they had to compete on quality alone, and Mac won.

It looks like history is now repeating itself. I rather hope with the 
same results.

--dave

On 04/07/18 06:20 PM, Peter King via talk wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>
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-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain

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