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

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Peter King via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Recently we were forcibly "migrated" to Office365 for our email services,

Interesting.

I take it that this is per department.  I just checked on email to my CS 
email account and it is only touched by Postfix and EXIM servers.

|   One of the last things
| I cannot figure out how to solve is how to pass an alias email address to
| the MS server.

I'm not going to help you, I'm going try to learn from you.

I don't understand fetchmail that well -- I set it up many many years
ago and haven't looked at it since.

What's an alias in this context?  Is it like what newaliases(1)
maintains for PostFix or Sendmail?

|  So in .fetchmailrc I have a line like this:
| 
| user "prof.bozo at utoronto.ca\department.chair at utoronto.ca"  there with password "XYZZY" is bozo here

I don't see \ used in this way in the fetchmail manual.  I don't think
it is what they call multidrop.  Is it part of the IMAP protocol?
Where is it documented?

How about two different user lines:

    poll whatever.utoronto.ca
	    user "prof.bozo at utoronto.ca"  there with password "XYZZY" is bozo here

    poll whatever.utoronto.ca
	    user "department.chair at utoronto.ca"  there with password "XYZZY" is bozo here

or even:

    poll whatever.utoronto.ca
	    user "prof.bozo at utoronto.ca"  there with password "XYZZY" is bozo here
	    user "department.chair at utoronto.ca"  there with password "XYZZY" is bozo here

PS: I've heard recommentations for getmail over fetchmail.  I haven't
needed to investigate.

| But this fails, and in the fetchmail logfiles it represents the username as
| not having a backslash:
| 
| Jul  4 14:35:14 fetchmail[13829]: IMAP> A0002 LOGIN "prof.bozo at utoronto.camedieval.philosophy@utoronto.ca" *
| Jul  4 14:35:14 fetchmail[13829]: IMAP< A0002 NO LOGIN failed.
| Jul  4 14:35:14 fetchmail[13829]: IMAP> A0003 LOGOUT
| 
| If I double-backslash it, though, I get a double backslash in the username.
| Ditto for triple, quadruple, and quintuple backslashes.  Nor does it work
| if I single-quote the backslash. 
| 
| According to the fetchmail manual, the backslash is used to communicate via
| ASCII sequences and codes with fetchmail, and it's pretty clear that this
| is part of the problem.

What piece of the software is supposed to handle \ the way you expect?

The sendmail manual seems to say that \ is just a way to denote tricky
characters.  So I think you expect your meaning of \ to be handled by
the IMAP server.  And that the old IMAP server did handle it.