# mutt with sasl



## Beastie (Jun 6, 2014)

Hello!

I use mail/mutt to log into my Yahoo mail account.

The latest mail/mutt update introduced security/cyrus-sasl2 as a new dependency (option *SASL=on*). Since then, it started showing this on startup:

```
Authenticating (PLAIN)...
```
... which I guess means my user name and password are transmitted in plain text, right?

I've never had the *imap_authenticators* option before in muttrc. The only one that works at all now (other than *plain*) is

```
set imap_authenticators="login"
```

The sasl(3) documentation is so huge I don't even know where to start looking.

How secure is this *login* and is there any better option?

By the way, I've been using the following settings:

```
set ssl_force_tls=yes

set folder="imaps://imap.mail.yahoo.com:993/"
```
So as I understand it, the above encrypts the plain-text login information through SSL/TLS. Am I worrying for nothing?

Any help would be appreciated.


----------

