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SMTP access fails on long/complex password (special characters)

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by psengel

psengel
psengel

Dear Developers,

I recently changed the password (it is a long and complex one) of my Active Directory account (SAMBA4). This serves as a authentication service for various services in my environment like Zarafa, Postfix, ownCloud etc.

I recognized that some mobile applications as well as desktop applications where struggling with my new password. I reported the issue and developers of these affected apps have identified and fixed a problem where their code was not dealing well with certain special characters in passwords.

My new, long and complex password consist of these characters: 

   a-zA-Z
   0-9
   |
   =
   #
   §
   ~
   @
   +
   %

It is 30 characters long.

With Thunderbird (45.2.0) I am facing a login problem as well (since the PW change): Access to my email server (Postfix) via SMTP fails (Login to server mail.xyz.net failed.) - IMAP (Zarafa) does work with the new, long complex password.

I have not done any deeper technical analysis but I can describe my high level architecture: IMAP access is going through Zarfa which is handling the password handshake by itself against the SAMBA4 domain. SMTP is served by Postfix which is set up to utilize SASLauthd which does the password check against my SAMBA4 domain as well.

Although Thunderbird is able to deal with the long and "complex" password via IMAP I could imagine that SMTP communication/auth takes a different code path and could still be affected. I also just found this bug which seems to be not fixed yet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=713295

Please verify/confirm whether Thunderbird might struggle with special characters in passwords or the length of the passwords when dealing with SMTP communication.

Thanks and best regards

Phillip

Dear Developers, I recently changed the password (it is a long and complex one) of my Active Directory account (SAMBA4). This serves as a authentication service for various services in my environment like Zarafa, Postfix, ownCloud etc. I recognized that some mobile applications as well as desktop applications where struggling with my new password. I reported the issue and developers of these affected apps have identified and fixed a problem where their code was not dealing well with certain special characters in passwords. My new, long and complex password consist of these characters: a-zA-Z 0-9 | = # § ~ @ + % It is 30 characters long. With Thunderbird (45.2.0) I am facing a login problem as well (since the PW change): Access to my email server (Postfix) via SMTP fails (Login to server mail.xyz.net failed.) - IMAP (Zarafa) does work with the new, long complex password. I have not done any deeper technical analysis but I can describe my high level architecture: IMAP access is going through Zarfa which is handling the password handshake by itself against the SAMBA4 domain. SMTP is served by Postfix which is set up to utilize SASLauthd which does the password check against my SAMBA4 domain as well. Although Thunderbird is able to deal with the long and "complex" password via IMAP I could imagine that SMTP communication/auth takes a different code path and could still be affected. I also just found this bug which seems to be not fixed yet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=713295 Please verify/confirm whether Thunderbird might struggle with special characters in passwords or the length of the passwords when dealing with SMTP communication. Thanks and best regards Phillip

All Replies (2)

Matt
Matt
  • Top 10 Contributor

I see that bug as resolved incomplete as the original poster abandoned it. It will never go any further than it is now. No one then got any further thatn the asertion of a single individual they experienced an issue, some five months later abother drive by comment with Zero usefull data.

Now to your issue. Have you verified using telnet that postfix can accept your password. I understand that Kerebos has, or had, all sorts of difficulties where passwords are long, so if you are using that to sync passwords then failure may occur.

I am also aware that Hotmail encouraged long passwords, but until a couple of years ago use anywhere but on their web page failed. I have heard nothing since so I do not know if Microsoft fixed it or the users just learned what the maximum was. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=663022

But I think this bug covers it from the Thunderbird side https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312593

psengel
psengel Question owner

I am not using hotmail.

This one looks like the right bug to follow regarding this issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312593

Thanks for looking it up @Matt.

Btw. telnet is working fine, as many other services (owncloud, zarafa, etc.) are able to successfully authenticate against my SAMBA4/Kerberos.

root@mail:~# echo -n 'myUserName' | base64 bXlVc2VyTmFtZQ==

root@mail:~# echo -n 'myComplexLongPasswordwithspecialchars' | base64 bXlDb21wbGV4TG9uZ1Bhc3N3b3Jkd2l0aHNwZWNpYWxjaGFycw==

root@mail:~# telnet localhost 25 Trying ::1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mail.sld.tld ESMTP Postfix (Debian/GNU) ehlo itsme.com 250-mail.sld.tld 250-PIPELINING 250-SIZE 10120 250-VRFY 250-ETRN 250-STARTTLS 250-AUTH PLAIN LOGIN 250-AUTH=PLAIN LOGIN 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES 250-8BITMIME 250 DSN auth login 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 bXlVc2VyTmFtZQ== 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 bXlDb21wbGV4TG9uZ1Bhc3N3b3Jkd2l0aHNwZWNpYWxjaGFycw== 235 2.7.0 Authentication successful